Interviewer: Catherine Puckett
Subject: Thelma Lindsey Roberts
Place: Jacksonville Beach, FL
Date: August 10, 1982
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P: This is Cathy Puckett and I'm interviewing Themla Roberts at her home in Jacksonville
Beach.
R: Right.
P: And the date is August 10, 1982. What is the address here?
R: 106 Ninth Avenue South, Jacksonville Beach.
P: Okay, when and where were you born? Just basic questions.
R: I was born in what was then Alachua county; November 29, 1911; near Heart Springs, which
is on the Suwannee River between Bell and Trenton.
P: So you've lived, you lived in the Suwannee region all your growing up.
R: Yes, uh huh.
P: With you, what I think I'd like to do, 'cause you have a lot of stories and you've probably
been thinking of different, different things, so I probably won't need to go into all of
these questions. Let's see, some of the saying that you used to use, like you were,
Sharon was telling me about Fly up.
R: (laughter) It's an expression which the chickens fly up and go to roost so people
occasionally said when they were going to bed, Let's fly up and go to bed. And another one
was, The morning rain is like the old woman's jig; it's soon over.
P: That's great.
R: Yeah, I think that one's cute.
P: What about, you called peanuts...
R: Pinders.
P: ...pinders.
R: Uh huh. Yeah.
P: Were there any other names that you had for animals, like pigs? Did you ever hear them
called pineywood rooters?
R: Yes. Razorbacks.
P: Razorbacks?

pge0 2
R: Yeah.
P: Okay. Any other animals that you remember? Woodpeckers? Were they called....
R: No, no, I don't remember anything special about those.
P: The sandhills, were they called the sandhills?
R: Uh huh. Sandhills.
P: Do you know any folk remeies for illnesses?
R: Well, I know one, I guess. The cactus that;iyou peal it off, get the thorns off of it and
put in on boils or we usually call ri-sings. I don't know how you spell that. Rising --
R-I-S-I-N', I guess. And it was supposed to draw it to a head.
P: So it was the inside.
R: Uh huh. Uh huh. It come out to where it draw the puss to the outside where it would
drain.
P: That's interesting.
R: And another, I think this was 1,'!.-;A ;.ng During 1918 -- I vaguely remember this --
when the soldiers came back from overseas, they brought this flu and of course, the
doctors didn't know how to treat it because rural doctors then gave calomel and castor
oil, and, which it was before the day of antibiotics, and that was about the only way they
knew to treat it, and this was, they tell me, why so many people died, because, boy, when
you took that calomel and that castor oil, you, that made you dreadful sick and weak,
too, usually, really. But I was saying that to say that my parents especially didn't
want us to get it, so every morning when we went to school, we put sulphur in our shoes,
how about that? (laughter) Can you imagine how that smelled? But most everyone else
did it too, so I guess no one noticed the smell. The main thing was to wear asafedita
around your neck. I guess you've heard of that one, probably, where you tie it up in a
little cloth and just put it on a string, put it around your neck, and you wore that to
ward off colds and flu and.... (laughter)
P: Okay, how about remedies for, I'll go down some of these remedies. Stomach aches?
Remember?
R: Oh, my father kept blackberry wine that we used for upset stomach and that sortof thing.
We kept wine, and grape wine, and blackberry wine. We made the wine and kept it in the
house all the time. It was used for medicinal purposes.

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P: Uh huh. Okay, tootache? Do you have anything special?
R: I don't remember anything for toothache.
P: Okay. Colds and coughs.
R: The asafedita was one and another thing they used was, they made up beeswax, Vick's Salve,
it seems to me, or sometimes we used tallow, melted it, put this cloth in it. Oh, I
hated the tallow and put a little camphcr in. I don't know what all
else and dip this cloth in it and then you wore it around your neck, you know, for chest
colds.
P: Pinned to your dress.
R: Uh huh, or on a string or something tied around your neck so you wouldn't lose it.
P: Did you hear it called a taller jacket?
R: Yes, I have heard it called that.
P: Okay. That's what I've heard it called.
R: And one thing that my parents used a whole lots was honey. They had bees and I used to
cough a whole lot and they gave us honey for coughs and colds.
P: My mom, too, and she's from north Florida. Okay. How about for birthing, for having
children, was there any kind of tea or any kind of medicine that they would give?
R: I don't think they gave much of anything and used midwives an awful lot. During my time
maybe they had doctors, but I can remember them talking about when they had midwives and
some of the older people, especially, thought it was ridiculous if you went to doctors for
checkups during pregnancy, well, you know, that's just unnatural, and thought that it was
just ridiculous to go to the doctor for checkups.
P: Uh huh. How about chicken pox or measles?
R: Measles, we drank hot sassafrass tea, hot sassafrass tea to break them out and

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R: of course, you drank sassafrass tea in the spring of the year, anyway, to build up your
blood.
P: Okay.
R: Yeah. The root, it's a tree that grows;in north Florida and you get the root and boil
the root and you, it's, the way I remember it, it's rather tasty because I remember we
sweetened and I did put milk in it and it's a red tea and we drank that, but that hot
sassafrass tea was supposed to break out measles.
P: Okay. I've heard that one. That's good. But I didn't know that they used the root of
the tree.
R: No, it was the root, yeah.
P: Chicken pox, do you remember any? I've heard that you can take a black hen -- and it has
to be black -- and scald it and then bathe the child in the broth.
R: I've never, I've never heard that. Now, I've heard for shingles.
P: Uh huh.
R: You know shingles are supposed to come in your abdom'al area and if they go all the way
around you and meet, it's supposed to kill you. That's what older people used to think.
And the remedy for that was to kill a black chicken and they cut it's head off and while
the blood was warm, let the warm blood run on the shingles. (laughter) I never saw it
done...
P: Uh huh.
R: ...but I heard people talk about doing it.
P: That's something.
R: Yeah.
P: Okay, for cramps, for women?
R: I don't know....
P: Haven't heard any?
R: No, I don't. I don't know any.
P: Warts?
R: Oh, warts, frogs was supposed to cause warts and what was supposed to take them off?
Someone who was born after a frog had died, I believe. They could take them off by some
_word they said, or something,

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P: I haven't heard that one. That's interesting. Do you remember the word?
R: I don't. No, I don't.
P: Well, well you said the cactus for boils. Were there other rememdies for boils?
R: Uh huh.
P: Turpentine, did you ever....
R: The other, the other, what was the other remedy? The, it was something.
I can't remember right now, what it was. Oh, sometimes they put fat meat on it.
P: Uh huh.
R: Just what they called fat back. Put fat meat on it, just a piece of real fat meat on
the boil and....
P: Any kind of meat or red meat?
R:, Fat, no, it has to be white, fat meat.
P: Okay.
R: And you put that on the boil. I think the idea was to bring the puss to a head so they
could open it and the puss would drain out.
P: Okay. For snake bites?
R: Whiskey. (laughter)
P: You drink whiskey and then....
R: Yeah, drink whiskey and if it was on your limb anywhere, why, of course, you cut the
place in an x, I suppose, and then sucked it, sucked the poison out and then bandage it
or put a tourniquet on it between the where the bite was and your body.
P: Wow. Okay. Sore throat?
R: Oh, we took. I guess we mostly for sore throat and honey.
P: How about arthritis or sore muscles or sore bones?
R: Watkin's Liniment. (laughter), You put that much of that and you.... We had a Watkins
dealer that came through the country. I don't know if anyone's told you that tale or
not.
P: No.
R: But this dealer came through the community and evidently he did quite well. He'd spend
the night at our house occasionally. I think he lived in Alachua. But he would just go
and hit every farm house and he carried, you know, medicinal supplies and flavorings and

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R: things of that sort.
P: Spices.
R: Spices, uh huh. And he had a big red bottle of Watkin's liniment and he has a white
liniment, too, but that was the remedy atiour house whether anything, any sore muscle or
any of that.
P: It just rubbed on.
R: Rubbed on. Uh huh.
P: Did he come in a wagon or....
R: Well, when I remember he came in a car.
P: Okay. Let's see. High blood pressure?
R: None of my people have ever had that. I really don't know.
P: Insect bites of mosquito bites?
R: I don't know much about the bite, but I guess we were so accustomed to those that we just
scratched it and let it go, but to keep mosquitoes out of the house when we didn't have
screens, we would take a pan and put old rags, old clothes in it, you know, and put sulphur
on it and before we'd go to bed at night put that in there where it would just smolder and
smoke.
P: Uh huh. So you would set it on fire.
R: Uh huh, uh huh. Yes.
P: And you'd put it near the window or....
R: Put it, just put it out in the middle of the room and let it smoke and keep the mosquitoes,
couldn't stand it, I guess, and you couldn't either hardly when you went in.
P: That's interesting. I haven't heard that.
Okay. What was your house like that you were born in and grew up in?
P: Well, the house that I grew up in, I think, was a typical farmhouse of that country. They
had two big rooms, a hall through the middle and a chimney at either end. One room was a
parlor and it had the organ in it and we had two fancy rockers in there and had a big
fancy big wooden bedstead, high wooden bedstead and marble topped dresser and of course,
you didn't go in there except maybe on Sunday or if you had company, why you went in there
and sat in there in that room and then it had two, three bedrooms. Had a bedroom on the
front porch, off the front porch was a bedroom. Then the kitchen hacd c kitchen and dnim$ng

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R: room and a pantry.
P: Your kitchen -- did it have a stove in it or did....
R: Yeah. We had a wood stove. We used wood altogether.
P: For cooking and for heating.
R: Yeah, what heat you had in the kitchen.
P: Okay. Did you have fire places in the bedrooms?
R: Yes. Well, we, well, in these two rooms we did. But in the other rooms we did not.
P: OkC., Were your chimneys built with sticks or....
R: Our chimney was built with salt rock. Some of them were built with moss and clay and
sticks. And sometimes the moss, the clay would was out, the rain, and would leave the
moss and occasionally would cause a fire. The moss would catch fire. But the house that
I grew up in, it had, the rocks were sewn out of the....
P:' Probably Suwannee Limestead.
R: Probably, yeah, probably was.
P: Okay. Your mattresses on your bed -- what were they stuffed with?
R: They were made with cotton, but they were made et home. They were hand-made.
P: Uh huh. Do you rer.ember doing that?
R: I remember, vaguely remember helping my mother some, do it. They ginned the cotton and
they brought it home and we had this, I guess cards, that we did the cotton, tried to
get all the dirt out of it and made the mattress out of it.
P: That's interesting.
R: And a fctbr'bed, each, the goal of each homemaker to have a feather bed on every bed.
That was....
P: So they would save all the feathers from chickens.
R: Well, you know the way they got the feathers, they had geese. And they took the geese
and took their feet and nailed them to a board with a staple and picked them and then
turned them lose. They did this, I guess, in the late spring. And then, you know, by
winter they would.....
P: Have a new coat.
R: ...have a new coat.
P: Wow. I never knew that.

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R: I never saw that done, but I've heard the old people talking about it. But that's the
way we did it. And some people did have geese. We never had geese, but
P: So they wouldn't use chicken feathers for stuffing a bed?
R: I don't think so. I don't think they were practical. I don't they they were, you know,
the down, they didn't have enough of that, there were too much of the feathers in it.
That it really wasn't that practical. Yeah, I don't think it was that practical.
P: Okay. Was most of your furniture home-made?
R: No. Our furniture was not. Our dining room table was home-made and we had benches on
either side of the table where the children sat, and of course, the adults sat in chairs,
but, you know, the furniture in the bedrooms was bought furniture. We had iron bedsteads.
P: What would a typical day have been like when you were growing up? I guess if you could
tell me a little bit about your family, your father and' mother.
R: Well, I was the second family. My father had been married before and the second time he
married -- which was my mother -- he had children older than my mother, which, I guess,
brought on some problems no doubt with the older children, seeing as their father there
with young children coning on when he was sixty and seventy years old. We had a big
530-acre farm, lots of cows.
P: Near Heart Springs.
R: Near Heart Spring. We had a small spring in the corner of our pasture, Heart Spring, and
of course, I saw four sisters, no brothers. Had a little brother that died in infancy.
And, of course, my father being old, why he had to help him with some of the family chores
around the house because he was not well enough, not strong enough to do all of them, so
because of that, we did help some with the chores on the farm.
P: How old was your father when he got married to your mother?
R: I....
P: And how old was your mother?
R: Let's see. I think he was sixty and my mother was twenty-six.
P: And what were their names?
R: My father's name was William Crawford Lindsey. My mother's name was Minnie Lee Slokum
and she had been married to Clemens and he died.
P: And she was pregnant, is that right, when she married?

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R: No.
P: Oh, okay.
R: What you're thinking about, perhaps, is she was pregnant with a child when her first
husband died.
P: That's what I meant.
R: She died before, I mean, her first husband died before the child was born.
P: So there was a lot of age difference between the two.
R: Yeah. I'm sure that it was, I've often thought about my mother, had a tendency sometimes
to feel sorry for herself. I guess I would have, too, if I had had the experiences that
she had. She, I understand that her parents did not want her to marry the boy that
she married the first time.
P: Uh huh.
R: But she married him against their will and then she was pregnant with their first child
and he had pneumonia, pneumonia, had typhoid fever, I believe, which at that time was a
very serious disease because they did not have the medication to control it that they
should have and then she had to go back home before the child was born and her other
brothers and sisters were there, which I'm sure, made it not as pleasant as it could have
been. And she married my father and there was all the older children there saying, What's
my daddy doing marrying this young woman and all these children coming along here?
P: How old was your father when he had his last child?
R: He was seventy-five. (laughter)
P: So he, how old did he live to?
R: He was eighty-four.
P: Eighty-four.
R: Uh huh.
P: And you were born?
R: In 1911.
P: 1911. So you remember him pretty well.
R: Oh, yes, yes. I was married, in fact.
P: When he died.
R: When he died, I was married. Yes. I had one child when he died.

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P: Well, when you got up in the morning, did you do a lot of chores or,...
R: Yes, we usually did. As I said, there were no boys to do it, and my father was old. We
had to help with taking care of the animals on the farm and the cows. We learned to milk
cows and sometimes had to help him take care of the horses. Usually kept two horses and
had a wagon and a buggy.
P: Uh huh.
R: Which was our transportation. I guess we bought our first car on '26.
P: Do you remember -- oh, the question went out of my head. What kind of crops did you
grow?
R: We grew mostly corn, peanuts, and velvet beans. The velvet beans were for the cows to
eat in the winter time. They were, grew on a vine and they'd run up around the cornstalks.
And later he did grow some watermelons, but mostly corn and peanuts for all the animEils
to eat.
P: And what about your family? Did you grow staple crops for the family to eat?
R: Yes. We had a garden most of the time. We had vegetables in our garden. JIn the summer,
of course, we had corn and peas and tomatoes and all those good things. Okra. Then in
the winter time we would have collards and mustard.
P: How did you store ycur food?
R: Well, didn't have much way of storing it, except what did can. We canned quite a bit of
food and cured the meat. It was smoked on up in the smokehouse and cured, salted down
for so long and then it was washed off and hung up in the smokehouse and cured.
P: Did you have cane, sugar cane?
R: Yes. Oh, I used to love to come home from school and gc out to the cane patch and cut
down a cane in the fall and sit out there and chew cain. That was good.
P: Did you use that for your own supply of sugar cane syrup and for making sugar?
R: Mostly for making cane syrup. Occasionally dad made some sugar, but not very often.
P: So did you usually use honey for sweetening?
R: We used a lot of honey for sweetening, uh huh.
P: You had bees.
R: Yes, we had bees. Not everyone had bees, but we did have some bees.
P: Did you have sugar cane parties?

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R: I had cane-grinding parties.
P: Cane-grinding parties.
R: Where you pull candy. Oh, the boys would put the candy, the syrup in your hands and it
would be hot, the candy. You have to start pulling it while it's warm, if you've ever
seen taffy, you know. Well, you pull it while it's warm.
P: How does it work? Did you have a mule or something?
R: Yeah, that....
P: Can you describe it?
R: Well the cane mill was in the center and you had a long pole and a horse, mule, a horse
fastened to it and it had a lead on it. I don't know if we should call it a board, and
you fastened this to the horse's head and then fastened him up to the pole and he just
went round and round, all day, poor thing. And someone....
P:
R: They had put the corn, they had put the cane in the mill and usually had a barrel to catch
the juiceiand had a cloth of some kirc to strain the juice to keep the, you know, the dirt
and different things from going in it.
P: And then you would boil it and make cane syrup?
R: Then put it in the sugar kettle and boil it down to where it was syrup.
P: Uh huh. And you would make candy when it was real hot.
R: The candy you got off of the side of the kettle just before they took the syrup up. You
get your cane peeling and scrape it off and eat it.
P: Okay. What did you do for fun, for relaxation?.
R: Well, we, course we built, didn't have many close neighbors and we had to be very creative
to do, you know, had to do things ourselves, played ball and did have some neighbors that
came over occasionally and then we would play ball or play drop the handkerchief or ring-
around-the-rosey or something of that sort.
P: Uh huh. Did you go fishing?
R: Yes, we went fishing. Dad usually took us fishing on Friday or Saturday, we went.
P: Down to Jack Springs, most of the time, cause that was in our pasture and we felt like we
were at home down there I guess. And you could caught some fish down there 'cause a lot

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R: of people didn't fish there, if you didn't people out and caught some
fish down there.
P: Catfish?
R: No, we had all kind of fish. Brim, Caught some catfish, but mostly brim.
P: Did you every hear of anyone dynamiting?
R: Yes, I sure have.
P: Do you know any stories about dynamiting? I remember you telling me one last week?
R: Well, I knew one boy, I knew this boy real well. He was down at Heart Springs and climbed
up in a tree. They dynamited mullet because mullet, they tell me, don't bite a hook
very well, and in that clear water, sometimes, there's schools of mullet come up there and
oh, there'll just be a big school of them, and as clear as crystal you can see them. So
he had climbed;upiin one of the cypress trees there and was going to dynamite them which
was illegal, but a lot of people did it anyone. Especially before we had our game and
fresh water fish commission, like we did. But he was up in the tree and dipped the
dynamite. For some reason, he thought it wasn't going off. You know how dynamite, how
they do it, it has a fuse on it, like a firecracker and he thought it had gone out and
so he attempted to light it again, is what they thought happened and it went off in his
hand, knocked him out of tree and they said blew him to pieces.
P: So he died.
R: Oh, yes. He was dead before he hit the, I'm sure, before he hit the water.
P: So did they do try to dynamite to try to get a lot of fish? It would kill....
R: Yeah. It would kill a lot of fish. I don't know. My folks never did dynamite. They said
it was illegal, but I know it was done a whole lots. But they tell me that the fish were
really not that good that were dynamited, that they were not that tasty. It did something
to them...
P: Uh huh.
R: ...when they were dynamited.
P,:
R: When they were killed by dynamite, I'm not sure they . ._
P: (laughter) Church was probably very important.
R: Oh, yes. You looked forward to that because that was, that was your social life to a

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R: great extent. Your world was very small. About ten or fifteen miles.
P: Uh huh.
R: We went to my grandfather's which was twenty-five miles away, it took us about eight or
nine hours to go.
P: Where did he live?
R: He lived over in Suwannee county near Branford.
P: And iwhatlwas his name?
R: Jesse Slokum.
P: So it took eight or nine hours to get there.
R: Uh huh, uh huh.
P: And church, where was the church that you went to?
R: Midway Church of Christ in Gilchrist county.
P: How long did it take you to get to church?
R: Well, we were not very far from church. We lived about a mile from church, so it didn't
take very long, really, to go to church.
P: Did most of the neighbors in that area all go to this church?
R: Yes. It was quite, very prominent in that area, that most everybody, roost everybody
around there were family. They were either related some way or another and most of the
people did.
P: So you would go to church on Sunday morning?
R: Uh huh, uh huh.
P: Sunday evening?
R: A lot of times didn't go on Sunday evening, just had the Sunday morning service.
P: And then you would probably have a Sunday dinner.
R: Yeah, that's, we had a Sunday dinner. Right.
P: And then you would go to church on Wednesday.
R: When I was growing up, we really didn't. Sunday morning was really about the only time
that we went to church.
P: What was Sunday dinner like? What kind of foods did you eat?
R: Oh, that was when you had all the good things. You'd probably go out on the yard and
kill a chicken and that was a delicacy. That's, you didn't have chicken every day like
we do now sometimes, !e would kill a chicken and dress it and have chicken and rice or

SR9A/page 14
R: chicken and dumplings, chicken and dressing, along with other vegetables.
P: Uh huh. And corn bread?
R: Corn bread. Yes, I've had some corn bread,
P: You didn't have white bread very much?
R: No, no light bread. Now I car remember when I first began to see light bread.
P: Even with the....
R: I don't know when it was. It must have been in the twenties, I guess, that it come out.
Corn bread and biscuits. Get up every morning, bake biscuits for breakfast and for
breakfast have sausage and grits and biscuits, syrup.
P: Sounds great.
So you usually had a pretty substantial breakfast.
R: Yes.
P: Did you usually have eggs, too?
R: Eggs, yes. We usually had eggs. We had chickens on the farm, so we had all them eggs.
P: And then you would eat your main meal at lunchtime.
R: Yes, that was the main meal, and then usually ate what was left over, especially if you'd
cooked a big pot full of peas and corn and different things for you noonday meal, why,
then, you ate what was left over, and if you had -- which we always did -- cows and milk,
why, clabber.
P: I've heard of it.
R: It's milk when it sours.
P: Okay.
R: What yogurt is just, I sometimes say, just glorified clabber.
P: Uh huh. (laughter)
R: See, you know, of course it has some seasoning in it. But ate that at night, lots with,
and sweetened it with syrup.
P: Uh huh.
R: Put syrup in it and had that along with your leftover, leftovers from the noonday meal.
Especially in the summertime when the weather was hot. We very seldom cooked at night,
unless, you know, it was a special occasion or something.
P: Okay. So clabber was a sweet kind of desert.

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R; No, it was, well it, you used it like you would buttermilk.
P: Okay.
R: Or put it in a glass and stir it up and put some syrup in it.
P:. Okay.
R: You've never seen clabber?
P: No.
R: Oh!
P: I've heard of it. Probably from my mother, but I have not seen it. Where did you go to
get supplies, things 1;ke cloth or spices or nails?
R: Trenton or Bell, and my mother ordered a lot of cloth and things that we from
mail-order houses. That was, and we'd have to meet the mail carrier and be sure that he
got them because the mail carrier didn't go to everyone's house. He'd come inside of the
house, perhaps, but you'd know about when to expect him to come, so you'd have to, I've
waited many days to, for the mail carrier to come and maybe he'd bring a package and, of
course, you were so excited when the pacakge came and you had something new.
P: Did you go with your father to town, to the store?
R: Yes. He usually took some of us. He was very kind and considerate and he usually took
some of us.
P: Did you go by wagon?
R: By buggy.
P: How long did it take to get to Trenton or Bell?
R: Well to take the trip to Trenton or Bell would be -- I don't know -- I'd say two or three
hours anway. Bell was eight miles and Trenton was ten, a little bit closer to Bell than
it was to Trenton, but Trenton had the bigger shopping area, bigger variety.
P: A little while ago you were telling me i story about your father sitting on the wagon with
his whip.
R: Sitting on the horse.
P: On the horse.
R: Horse. Had a lot of cows and in the spring and summer they would be, let them go in the
swamp and, you know, feed. Then he would bring them up in the wintertime and he'd have
something that he'd brought in the fields for them, so he'd go hunt the cows and bring then

SR9A/16
R: up and I've heard my half-brother say it was a sixteeni-foot whip. I don't know.
I know it wa: a long one. I thought then it was a long one. But he would sit on old
Lil and pop that cow whip and he could really make it pop. I think the only time he
ever whipped me was one morning I was getting dressed for school and he was bringing,
he was changing some cows around some way and he told me to open a gate and I was a little
bit slow getting out there and cows got away and he had to go back and run them down. So
it was too bad for me when he gct the cows all situated. That's the only time I ever
remember rly father spanking me.
F: Giving you a whipping.
R: Yeah. (laughter)
P: Now, you said your father remembers hearing the guns at the battle of Olustee?
R: Yes. Uh huh.
P: Can you tell me about that?
R: He was in Lake City at that time. Heard the guns. He wasn't old enough to be in the
regular army, but he was in the home guard and they drafted all of them to help take care
of the widows and children and the wounded soldiers. They had a hospital in Lake City for
the wounded soldiers. And these younger boys had to haul supplies tc them and see that the
women and children, as much as they could, had something to eat and were taken care cf.
And he was hauling supplies and there was some noise, a distraction of some kind and the
horse jurped and ran away with him. He started to get in the wagon, had to spin up on
the wheel and the horse jumped and it threw him down and dragged him and broke his leg
and it really was never fixed or anything like it should have been fixed. Father didn't
as long as he lived, I guess he should have. I don't know if he could have done anything
about it or not, but I know it bothered him some 'cause he limped.
P: Did he ever talk about the Civil War?
R: Oh, yeah. I wish I had written down all the tales that he told us about it, but he
talked a lots about that. Especially as he got older, he talked more and more about it.
P: Do you remember any stories that he told?
R: That's about-the only one I remember any of them talking about him being there and hearing
the guns and of course, they were all frightened.
P: Did he ever talk of slaves?

SR9A/page 17
R: Yes, he remembered when his parents had slaves and, of course, some of the slaves stayed
with their masters and they had good masters. After they were freed, why they had no
place to go, they really fared better to stay with their masters than they did to try to
get out on their own because they had no where to go and nothing to do with, so I've heard
him say that some of theirs stayed with them. He used to tell a tale about when they had
someone, a big, black Negro, and said he had the prettiest white teeth that he had ever
seen. Of course, their teeth, you know, always shine against their black skin. He said
this Negro didn't have a toothbrush, but said, everytime he washed his face he took his
finger and washed his teeth with his finger. (laughter) Can you imagine that? I've
never seen anyone do that! He also told a tale one time about he and one of the slaves
-- I think this was a young boy -- were going to get the horses and they saw a bear, and
they, of course, were frightened. They started trying to run and the slave boy had his
bridle and he got tangled up in the reins and fell down. Oh, and daddy said he almost
died and I'm sure I would've probably if I had seen a bear coming iand had fallen down.
P: Do you remember the slave's name?
R: No, I don't. No, I don't. No, I don't have any, I've heard him say, too, I've heard
him say what their names were, but I don't remember what they were.
P: Did he say the slaves were well-treated?
R: Some of them were and some of them were not. Now, he said their slaves were, of course,
up until, were good to their slaves.
P: Were these slaves on this property or in Lake City?
R: No, these, these slaves, I think, were in South Carolina. See, my father came from
South Carolina...
P: Okay, okay.
R: ...to this area, and I think this was really before they left South Carolina that they
had the slaves.
P: Uh huh. That's interesting. What did he think of the Civil War? Do you remember him
saying?
R: I don't remember that he ever expressed himself in regard to the Civil War.
P: Uh huh. This is really interesting. Did you ever hear talk, a few people in a couple of
areas have said that after slaves were outlawed that people still had slaves? Did you
ever hear any tAli: of that?

SR9A/page 18
R: Yes. Like I said that my father, some of them stayed on, but they did it willingly. I
think it's interesting, out from Lake City there's a family, quite a section, an area,
community, I guess would be a better word, of black people. They're very thrifty farmers,
grow tobacco and they're very affluent. Their names are Watson and they go back to a
family that had them, you know, during slavery and when they left, they were freed, why,
of course, they took their owners' name because they had no name except Jim or John or
whatever their first name was, you know. So they took their owners' name and these,
these, this community out there still go by the name of Watson.
P: Really?
R: Uh huh.
P: That's something. Are there any people who have, are very old or could remember like
their fathers and mothers?
R: I don't know if there is or not. I don't, I really don't know if there is or not. I don't
know them that well. I know they grow tobacco and I've heard -- Leo worked the tobacco
market on year End I always talk about him bringing the tobacco. I know they're considered
very thrifty and I've heard this tale told...
P: Very good people.
R: ...uh huh, more times than one about this is where they got their name is from there.
P:
R:
P: Did you, well, did people tell stories a lot when you were growing up, for entertainment?
Like now we watch TVs and....
R: Yes. I think people visited more and talked more with families, visited more and talked
more. Our father went to school back when you had to pay to go to school and he had a
brother that didn't like school very well, and he told us that one time his mother, who
was a widow-woman, had rayed for his younger brother to go to school and he wouldn't go,
so my father went to school instead and he, he was fairly well-educated and he liked to
read. He used to read Bible stories. We really didn't have much reading material.
Pi' Not many books available.
R: No, not many books available, We really didn't have much. But were all, my mother .rd
father both loved to read and they were always reading to us something.
P: How about singing?

SR9A/page 19
R: Yes, on Saturday night especially I had a half-sister that played the pi--, the organ,
the old pump organ, you know that you peddle. We'd gather in, the neighbors and she
would play the organ and we would have, they would sing, Lsually hymns, you know.
P: Uh huh.
R: And they'd stand around and sing. Some good singers.
P: Yeah. I heard some of those people at the church.
On the subject of stories -- do you remember any tall tales or tales that you heard, like
hunting or stories that your father had, or haunted houses or famous
people?
R: I remember when I grew up over on the Suwannee River, out from there was
Noolsey
a house that was supposed to be haunted. It was called the N House. I never did know
why it was supposed to be haunted. The only reason that I knew it was just had stood
there for several years vacant. It was a beautiful, two-story home and when I was in
school, why, this was one of the main attractions on weekends to go over to the Woolsey
House, to the haunted 'cuse and I never did go. (laughter)
P: Oh. Where did you go to school?
R: I went to school at, well, my first schooling was at Suwannee. It was a little two-
teacher school ano' it's gone now. There's nothing there. I don't think that, it's
probably just a field.
P: Is it a community? Was that a community?
R: I guess it was named Suwarnee because of the river, is the only reason I know, because
the community is not called Suwannee
P: Okay.
R: I don't know if you care about this or not, but an interesting thing in my family, my
sister younger than I, was two years younger than I and when we went to school we didn't
go but six months out of the year and you had to buy your books. Everybody bought their
books. Go from, usually July to December, because of the farmers -- they'd start farming
in January and by July everything was pretty well over with, so first year after I was in
the primer -.- of course we had only one or two books to read out of; didn't have all the
material to work with now that you have -- so my sister and I, we'd play school and she

SR9A/page 20
R: learned it in a short time to where she knew it as well as I did, so she'd be the teacher
part cf the time and I'd be the teacher part of the tire, so we learned it and the next
year, she still wasn't old enough to go to school, and I was in the second grade, and of
course, I had a speller and arithmetic, a little bit, two more books that year, a reader,
but the next summer she and I played school again and she learned all the books, learned
all the words, learned how to spell and how to work the arithmetic. That's about all we
had to do, so in hot weather, we'd do that. Sc when time come to go to school, of course
she started, and they put her in the primer for the first grade and they hand an old chart,
a big old chart they used, and she knew it from memory. She could say it backwards and
forwards, so then they put her, she stayed in here a few days and they saw that she knew
that, so then they put her in the second grade where she knew it as well she did the other
because we'd just gone over it that summer, so in less than a month's time she was in the
third grade with me and she and I went through school in the same grade.
P: Oh, that's really neat. That's something.
R: She taught school, then when she got out. She taught school for forty-something years.
P: Which sister is this?
R: This is Merle.
P: Okay.
R: She's the one, she died in, just about a month before did. She lived in
, Virginia.
P: Okay.
R: She's the one that taught so long,..
P: Right, you told me.
R: ...that me and Avers mentioned that day, you know...
P: Uh huh.
R: ...we was talking about and the lady that was sitting at the next table, I don't know if
you mentioned, she mentioned about Merle, asked me about if I was Merle's sister.
P: She taught sixth grade.
R. Uh huh. Right. Sixth grade.
P: (laughter)

SR9A/page 21
R: She and Ruby had something on the sixth grade.
P: And Karen Xow on kindergarten. This is getting to the end. I'm going to have to....
R: ...because I'm sure not doing a very good job here.
P: Oh, yeah, you are. It's really interesting. And if you have certain things that you've
been thinking about that you want to tell me, just butJright in.
R: I always thought that was interesting about Merle. She was a very.scholarly person,
very studious person. She, you know, learned real quickly.
P: Yeah. We used to play school, too, little kids. (laughter)
R: I think most children do. I guess
P: And later on we stopped lot of it. Let's see. Did you ever hear tales about moon-
shiners?
R: Oh, yes. I surely did.
P: Do you remember any?
R: Yes. When I taught school, when I was sixteen years old, the people that I boarded
with....
P: Where did you teach school?
R: I taught school at a little school out from Live Oak. Falmouth. It was on the Suwannee
Riverand the people over there, that seemed to be one of the pasttimes over there and
I think the people that I roomed with, that I boarded with, they would leave home
about the time that the rest of us were starting to go to bed and they'd come home about
the time we got up every morning, and I thought it was so strange where my father was
always home at night and I thought this was so strange. So before I left there was a
nice family in the neighborhood and asked me to come up and room with them and they
asked me didn't I know that so-and-so ran moonshine, and of course, I was naive, a
sixteen-year-old girl, I said, I didn't know. I said, No, I didn't know what they were
doing. They said, Well, they were some of the biggest moonshiners in this whole area.
(laughter)
P: Was moonshining common?
R: Yes, very common. And especially out in back, backward areas, I think. And this was
a backward area on the Suwannee River. This was a one-teacher school.
P: Did they ever have revenues come in? Did you ever hear stories of revenues breaking

SR9A/page 22
P: up into stills?
R: Well, I have some. But not anything right now that's very interesting.
P: Uh huh.
R: About my school teaching when I was sixteen years old, I had this little girl that was
Sweedish descent and she had very, she had a deep voice, and, of course, I was sixteen years
old. No training. I hadn't even finished high school. I don't know why they let me teach
school, but anyway, they did. But, you called everyone up to the front, to the
recitation bench and you you gave head marks, and, of course, if you spelled a word, why
you could go ahead of the other person. So this little girl, she was a very studious little
girl. I remember giving her out the word "swan" and she said, S-W-A-A-N. No that isn't
right. S-W-A-A-N. So I let the next person below her turn her down and she was so heart-
broken because someone had turned her down. And then and then write the
word and she came up there and it finally dawned on my that that was the way she was
pronouncing "w": (laughter)
P: Oh, no.
R: Poor thing. I felt sorry for her so many times since then.
P: That's funny. How many children did you teach?
R: I didn't have very many. Probably thirty, thirty-five. Had grades through the sixth, I
believe.
P: Wow.
R: Had some boys in there older than I was and taller.
P: Was that a problem?
R: No, theyminded. We didn't have any problem.
P: Uh huh.
R: Because they was just in short-term school then.
P: Yeah.
R: Rural area.
P: I don't know if you would have heard any hunting or animal stories.
R: No, my half-brother, you met, Albert's the one that was at the reunion the other with the
walker, he used to do a lot of hunt, hunting squirrels, but I don't know any, anything of
any.

SR9A/page 23
P: What was a holiday dinner like, or Christmas or Thanksgiving? How did you celebrate?
R: Well, I think, very much like we would today. Probably didn't get as,
children didn't get as many toys as they did now. We, I can remember, we a lot of times
got apples and oranges and candy in our stockings and all, usually got one or two nice
toys, but had some stuffers, you know, things in there, just apples and oranges because we
didn't have fruit all the time and that sort of thing, but the Christmas dinner, we usually
had, well we had some turkeys on the farm, too, and we sometimes had a turkey or a big hen,
or, you know.....
P: Would you make dishes for a long time before Christmas? Pumpkin pies?
R: On, you'd start, yeah, start baking, you know, two or three days, and bake an bake.
P: What were traditional Christmas dishes or pies?
R: We usually had a fruitcake and pies, my mother made a lot of sweet potato pies. I don't
know if you've eaten sweet potato pies.
P: I love it. And I want to see if you have the recipe, if you have any recipes.
R: I think I have a recipe in there for a sweet potato pie and they were good and pumpkin
pies, you'd gather your pumpkin from the fall of the year, and most people just put them in
with the corn in the corn crib and they used corn like they used all kind of pumpkin, so a
lot of times, especially Thanksgiving, you'd have the pumpkin pie and just There
wasn't really that much difference, I guess, in what we would have today.
P: Let's see. Were neighbors very important?
R: Very important. Yeah, they were very important because, your, as I said before, yourworld
was very small and your neighbors, maybe your neighbor would be a full mile.
P: Uh huh.
R: But it was interesting, in the evening, you could usually hear the boys in the neighborhood
calling cows or a'hollering and someone else would answer them.
P: Uh huh. I bet that felt nice. Would neighbors help out, like say, if a farmer got ill, or
in building a house. Was that kind of thing common?
R: Yes, it was. I remember one time my father was ill in the spring of the year. Of course,
he was an older person and wasn't able to get his land ready to plan and someone organized
a group and they came in and, oh, I don't know, must have been eight or ten came in and

SR9A/page 24
R: in just a days' time, of course they prepared a lot of land and got it ready to plant so
he really wasn't that far behind once....
P: So that kind of thing was common.
R: Yeah, very common.
P: And could save a family, essentially.
R: Yes, that's true.
P: Did you feed all the men or....
R: Yes, we fixed a feast.
P: Did the women come along with them?
R: Mostly just the men. Maybe if it was a very close acquaintance that the woman might come
along, but mostly the men. I know that's the way it was at our house that time. That's
the only real experience that I had with that, but I know this time. And of course, we
cooked for about two days trying to get, and fixing and getting pies and cakes and in the
morning they came, why, we cooked up a big meal and had it ready for them.
P: Right. That's nice.
R: Something about the preserving of the meat, the backbone, the ribs and the boney pieces of
the meat, they would take that and put it in a pot of lard and let it fry till it would,
those
you know, it was fried brown and then they would cook that in a crock, big old stone
crocks and cover it with lard, and that would keep. It wouldn't spoil if you would fried
it good and brown ,put it in those crocks and cover it with your lard, your hog lard, 'cause
that's what you used. And, oh, I can remember coming home, maybe after you'd worked and been
out helping dad do something and my mother would have some of that meats taken out that of
that and put it in the oven and get it hot, good, and hot...
P: Uh huh.
R: ...well, they'd just let it get good and hot and melt all the grease off of it and maybe bake
some sweet potatoes. Oh, nothing will ever taste as good as that did. I'm sure it wouldn't
taste like I imagine the taste even if I tasted it now, but I would think that was some of
the best.
P: Did you have a name for it?
R: No, they just took the bones and fried them up and....

SR9A/page 25
P: And it's the bones,
R: Uh huh. The backbone, and the ribs and the boney parts,
P: But they left meat on it.
R: Yeah, yeah. They, it wasn't like you'd by at the market now. They was really, they left
meat on it.
P: So, did you keept it in the smokehouse or....
R: Yeah, had the smokehouse, uh huh.
P: Okay.
R: Had a shelf with the crocks, I wish we had kept some of our old crocks. I don't have the
first one. I don't know where they are.1
P: Oh, that would be nice.
R: Yeah. And, of course, everyone had, or most people did, my father did, had a number of big
old crocks that we put our lard and things like that in.
P: How did you keep ants or bugs out of your food, like in the smokehouse, or your honey or
your sugar?
R: Well, in the smokehouse, they salted it, they just covered it with salt, they just put salt
all over it and then when they, let it stay like that, I don't know how long -- a week, two
weeks, ten days, something -- they take and take it in a pot of hot water and dip it in that
and smoke it
and then they'd hang it up and build a little fire under itAuntil it was smoked brown and
of course, you know, well, there wasn't very -- what did they call that bug that got into
there? Skippers.
P: Yeah, I've heard of that.
R: Skippers would sometimes get in the meat and they'd have to take it out in the sun and
cut it all out, you know, and burn it, and get them out of the meat. But I can't remember
us having much problem with ants and..... We had a stove that had a warming closet, I
mean, you know what that is, that hole in.... And we put that food up, usually, put the
food in the afternoon up in that and nothing bothered it and, of course, if you had vege-
tables left over, you usually just left them in the pot that you'd cooked them in on the
stove.
P: What is a warming closet, now?
R: It's a range and it has a....

SR9A/page 26
P: Shelf?
R: Yeah, uh huh. And it has doors. Lindsey's, that stove of Lindsey's has one.
P: Okay. I have not been over to his house. I'll look and see.
R: Next time you go to Lindsey's house, why, you look in that upstairs where, I think Anne
has spices and things in it.
P: Uh huh.
R: That's, that's the warming closet.
P: Gee, that's neat.
Oh, okay. Here's some things, too. Are any animals, birds, snakes, etc., associated with
bad luck or good luck or are there things that you recall about animals? Like I've heard
if you dream about fish it means somebody in your family is going to get pregnant.
R: No, I don't know.
P: Or if an owl hoots after dark, someone's ill.
R: Seems like I have heard that one. But I haven't heard that about the fish. And I'm sure
you know about the black cat and the ladder.
P: Uh huh. How about getting-married sayings. I've heard if you get up from the table and
knock your chair over you won't get married.
R: That's true. Or if you let somebody sweep under your feet, you won't get married that
year. (laughter) I don't remember any more right now.
P: Do you remember any dreams that are supposed to mean anything?
R: If you dream of a marriage it's supposed to indicate there is going to be a death in the
family.
P: Of a marriage?
R: Uh huh.
P: Gee, okay.
R: You're not supposed to start any work on Friday unless you could finish it on Friday. They
thought it was bad luck. You'd die before you finished it.
P: Gee, I haven't heard that one.
R: I heard that one some, some of these days. If you can think about it and ask Lina something

SR9A/page 27
R: about these old 'cause she'll probably remember some of those...
P: Okay.
R: ...much better than I.
Pi' Okay. These are mostly hunting questions. Oh, with fish, now did you ever get fish from
the Gulf when you were growing up?
R: Uh huh.
P: Did you trade?
R: Yeah. It was a very common practice in the fall for people to, sometimes they would go in
groups. They would put covers on their wagons and go down to the Gulf and they would carry
potatoes and meal or lard or meat and carry it down there, swap it to the fisherman for
fish.
P: In the town of Suwannee.
R: Well, from where we lived they went to Horseshoe mostly?
P: Uh huh.
R: You been to Horseshoe?
P: Uh huh.
R: Well, that's where they went then, most of the time. And then they'd big the fish back,
lug it, back to going when the yellow roe were in and we'd get those and then they'd
salt those and make a brine like and preserve those. We had to take them out at night and
soak them overnight in water and get the salt out of them and then we'd eat them, but you
didn't salt
P: Uh huh. And would you get like smoked mullet? Would you trade for fish also, not just
roe, but for fish?
R: Yeah, you'd get the fish and the mullet, I mean the roe would be in the mullet, see.
P: Oh, okay.
R: You would dress them and get the roe out.
P: What other things do you remember trading for in the beach area or the Gulf area? Other
kinds of fish.
R: Mullet's about the only thing that I remembered that we ever got.
P: Did you go over there ever with your father?
R: One time was all that I ever went. We planned to go another time, but it came up a

SR9A/page 28
R: hurricane and, I don't know, we got torn off and we didn't go.
P: How long did it take to get to Horeshoe?
R: Oh, it takes, used to get to spend the night on the way over
there. And, of course, the people who went all the time, they knew where the springs of
fresh water were, and they'd go and plan to camp there, and then go on the next day and
camp. They'd just stay a day or two, maybe two days, and then come. It'd take about a
week to go and come back.
P: Gee, that's really interesting. You know what crawdads are, crayfish?
R: Uh huh.
P: Did you ever eat those or catch those?
R: I've eaten them but...
P: Not in Florida.
R: ...not if Florida. I
P: Catfish stew? Someone was telling me that your husband knew how to make it.
R: Yeah. If the cat, if the fish were very large, they saved the heads, they cleaned the heads,
took their eyes out and boiled their heads and made stew.
P: How do you make it? What else did you put in it?
R: My folks never did save the heads that much. I've seen and heard other people talk that
did, but my folks really didn't. There really isn't that much on them except seasoning, I
guess you'd get some seasoning out of it to boil the heads. Well, you boil it, and of course.
it doesn't take it very long to get tender and put onions and butter and milk and sometimes
tomatoes.
P: That's nice. I have to write down some recipes, 'cause when we're done, I'd like to ask you
quite a few, and also Aunt Lina.
R: Yeah, she'll probably be able totell you.
P: Have you seen the river change in your lifetime, the Suwannee River?
R: I haven't seen the river change that much. I've seen Heart Springs change an awful lot. The
boil is in an altogether different place to what it was when I grew up.
P: Really? Where was it when you grew up?
R: When I grew up it was a little north of where it is now. And there was a road, actually
there was a road between where it is now and where it was when I grew up.

SR9A/page 29
P: Gee. Why was Heart Springs called Heart Springs? Was it named after a family?
R: I really don't know. I don't know if Lina would know or not, but I just don't know.
P: Did you go swimming there much?
R: Yes. Occasionally. We didn't go there a whole lots. We went down, I think it's interest-
ing that we went bathing there when we had worked all day in the hot sun in late afternoon,
we would literally go bathing because it wasn't commercialized like it is now. There, some
people were there, if there were anyone they'd probably be just neighbors and we'd take a
towel an soap and washcloth and literally go down to bathing.
P: Uh huh. Well, you must have taken turns.
R: Yeah. (laughter)
P: Okay. Did you bathe a lot, or is it a thing that you always hear about once-a-week bathing?
R: Saturday night bath?
P: Uh huh.
R: Well, I think when you worked out, you know, and got dirty and sweaty.... Of course, we
didn't have bath tubs. We had, you know, a big washbasin. You wasn't with us the day
we went down to Miss Jester's. She has some of the old cans like you used to get them, and
you just sort of, as my aunt used to say, just sort of took a dry-cleaning, I guess, you
know and then maybe on Saturday nights you'd get in the, get the washtub in and fill it up
with warm water and really, I guess, I guess that's where the idea came from, Saturday
night bath and the other nights you would just sort of...
P: Rinse off.
R: ...take a dry-cleaning.
P: Okay. Did you make your own soap?
R: My mother made the soap to wash clothes with. Now we didn't bathe with that. We bought it.
P: What, you bought soap for bathing?
R: Bought toilet soap for bathing.
P: Did you swim? Did you actually know how to swim?
R: I didn't swim very much. I swam very little.
P: Did most women, probably fewer girls ever swam than men.
R: I would thinkmost, most girls who grew up in that area who had brothers or younger fathers
probably would, but dad wasn't up to, up to going in with us. He was sixty-two when I was

SR9A/page 30
R: born so time I got up any size, well, he wasn't really up to going in with us, I think he
swam when he was younger. But many times they'd have to swim across the river, swim the
horses across and that sort of thing, different places, but I really didn't go swimming
P: Okay. Well, I've heard Earl and Aunt Ruby says...
R:
P: ...right-- I couldn't remember his last name for a minute -- that there are not as many
fish as there used to be in the Suwannee River. Is that your experience or do you think
you can make a comparison?
R: I don't know about that really. I think that he would be a better authority on that than
I. I've heard people say that because the, the, well, I guess because most people fish
there and another thing, because of the motor boats...
P: Uh huh.
R: ...that go up and down there, I guess.
P: Wash away all the eggs.
R: Uh huh, uh huh. Killed it.
P: Let's see. How have you seen the are around the river change in your life?
R: Well, I think it's changed a considerable. I don't think the people who live there live
anything like we did, because it's modernized and they now have in rural areas anything
that we can have in an urban area. They have their television sets, they have their deep-
freezes, they have electricity, have running water and bathtubs and that sort of thing where
when I grew up we didn't. We, we had a windmill. You've see them, you know, a windmill,
maybe...
P:: Uh huh.
R: ...that pumped water, but we had to carry it to the house. It didn't run up to,the house,
it didn't....
P: Well, what do you think was the most valuable experience of growing up that way? What did
you learn from it?
R: Well, I think it's like Dr. McCrae, my mother's doctor said, the morning she died, he said
-- well, she was ninety-two -- and he said, well, he said the younger generation will never

SR9A/page 31
R: live to be this old, probably. He said, they're not conditioned for it as they grow up
and I think that as we grew up, we were conditioned for these things, I don't think, and
it isn't their fault at all, it's just the circumstances and the times that my children
could go through with what I had gone through with, even in rearing a family, because as
they grew up they were not conditioned for it. I didn't want them to be. I didn't want,
you know.
P: To have the same kinds of things.
R: Uh huh, uh huh. Same kinds....
P: But you think it gave you strength?
R: Yes, uh huh. I think it does. I think it yeah.
P: Where did boys meet girls and girls meet boys?
R: School or church out by the times at church and....
P: Did they get married younger?
R: I think so. I think much younger, course I was eighteen and Moe was twenty-three when we
married, but I think it was a general thing that they did marry much younger. I know his
parents married -- I think his father was maybe a little older, but his mother was rather
young, fifteen, sixteen.
P: Really? That's something.
Did you have any special places for courting? Karen told me about a saying, Meet me at the
mouth?
R: Well, that was my mother. We really didn't, we really didn't have that place. You know,
Moe, now, he had a car when we dated and we went places, but I think that was right there
where my mother grew up. I think that was quite the thing down the mouth of the....
P: Will you tell me about it? Is that the same as she told you?
R: I know very little about it. My mother wouldn't talk about things like that much to us. I
don't know why, but she was very reluctant to talk about some of those things.
P: But meet me at the mouth basically meant....
R: At the, where the Santa Fe goes into the Suwannee River and of course, it was very pretty
area down there and very picturesque and, I guess, very romantic, so it was a nice place
to meet.
P: It was a courting place.

SR9A/page 32
R: Yes, uh huh. (laughter)
P: Were there generally to go around or enough women to go around?
R: I think it was very much then like it is now, seeing so many of them. I really do think....
P: So you had a pretty good choice.
R: Yeah.
P: Okay. I think I've already asked you.... Oh, did you use any wild plants for food, like
for pies or fruits or honey or trees or grasses?
R: No. I heard of people who used the polk..
P: Polk weeds.
R: ...polk weeds, eat, ate that, but we never did. I've never eaten any, but I've heard a lot
of people who did.
P: Did you ever hear of any charms or spells, even if you don't believe in them, like how could
you tell if someone loved you or how could you make someone love you? Things like that.
R: No. I can't think of one right now. Probably I heard some, but can't think of one right
this minute.
P: I've already asked you about dreams. Did you have any heroes, or know of any heroes that
were on the river, say a Paul Bunyan of the Suwannee River?
R: No, no, not especially that I can remember.
P: Did you ever hear of Lord Bill of the Suwannee River?
R: I've heard the name, but that's all. My mother used to talk about that some, I've heard
her talk about it some.
P: Oh, really? Then maybe Lina might....
R: Yeah, she might remember something about that.
P: Any strange people or talked-about people, people who were different, who were unusual,
bad people?
R: We had, we had some people who were share-cropping with us one year and they were very --
I don't know what the word is -- but anyway, they were very backward people and really not
very clean and they were working around there and his wife had gone over into Dixie county
and she came back and when she got to the river, the river was high, you know. That river
comes up high sometimes, it's way out there where you have do go. And she waded across the
river and game out there and when she got home, why, he was up at the house, I think we were

SR9A/page 33
R: grinding cane and he was helping around the house and she was bare-footed -- she went
bare-footed most of the time -- and I remember him looking at her and said, My God, Annie,
why don't you put on your shoes.
P: Oh, no. Did people go barefoot a lot then?
R: Adults didn't, that I saw they didn't. Of course, children did in the spring and summer.
Children went barefoot, but the adults did not. I don't, you'd see more of that now, I
think.
P: Did you ever hear any stories of the Klu Klux Klan?
R: No, we didn't hear much about the Klu Klux Klan.
P: You were telling me a story once about a doctor who was involved with a woman who killed him?
R: Oh, yeah. Ruby McCullom.
P: Ruby McCullom.
R: He killed Dr. Adams in Live Oak.
P: And that was a big scandal back then.
R: Oh, yeah, yeah. That was something, yeah.
P: Can you tell me about it?
R: Well, reportedly, she was his mistress and had had one child by him and was pregnant with
another child and, of course, there were a lot of tales about it that they were mixed up
with Bolita and one thing and another, but one Sunday morning she just went in his office --
I guess, evidently he had patients on Sunday morning -- and she just had her little gun and
shot him. Killed him instantly.
P: And there was a trial.
R: Yes. And this William Bradford Hewey came down from the north and tried to interview her
and he was forbidden to include, the authorities, legal authorities didn't want him to
interview her. They didn't want the story published. But it was published and the story
was banned in Florida for a while. But I saw, the other day, in the Lake City Reporter,
where this is going to be, come out in the Lake City Reporter in serial form.
P: Wow.
R: I'm looking forward to seeing it.

SR9A/page 34
P: Yeah, that will be something.
R: I read it way back then, but, of course, I've forgotten my little details, but I think one
reason it was banned was because it named so many prominent people in Lake City and Live
Oak who were involved in that, in it, so....
P: Uh huh. I can imagine that would have a great deal to do with it.
R: Yes.
P: Was Lake City called Lake City when you were growing up or was it called Alligator?
R: It was called Lake City ever since I've known it. Of course, I was an adult. I was married
before I moved to Lake City. When Moe and I married we lived in Bell for about two years.
That was in the good old Depression years.
P: With your parents?
R: With his parents, yes.
P: His parents.
R: And he, they had a grocery store, and he managed the grocery store and Depression years
came on and it just got worse and worse and this music company came through, a man that
we met the other day, Cecils, it was actually his uncle that came to Bell, taught singing
school there and Lloyd and Geneva and him went and he asked Moe to go with him and teach
singing schools because Moe was a good singer then and he asked him to go with him and he
taught singing schools then, I guess for about a year, or longer than that I guess, and
evenutally he got, someone asked him to go to Manville which is a suburb of Tampa and he
taught some schools around there and we moved down there and stayed down there for two or
three years and eventually came to Lake City in 1937.
P: Uh huh. So the Depression years were hard.
R: They were hard. When you live on $2.50 a week.
P: Uh huh.
R: Of course, we had vegetables growing and had some chickens, which helped. But $2.50 would
buy much more than it will now. $2.50, 10 would buy ten pounds of meal. You could buy
a stalk of bananas, if you went to some of those fruit markets down there for a quarter.
And, you know, $2.50 bought, well I say $2.50, we had more than that. We really didn't have
much money to live on.
P: Uh huh. And you were having children then.

SR9A/page 35
R: Yes.Uh huh.
P: Which makes it even harder.
R: That's for sure and trying to get started, young people trying to get started.
P: So your husband taught singing schools?
R: Yes.
P: And he was a minister?
R: Yes.
P: How did that happen, becoming a minister?
R: Well, before we were married, he went Freed-Hardeman College, which is a Bible School?
P: Where?
R: In Henderson, Tennessee.
P: Okay.
R: Well, prior to that, as I had said before, he was a good singer, he just had a perfect
ear, almost, for music and was a good singer, he had travelled withthis evangelist who did
a lot of evangelistic work.
P: What was his name?
R: Cleve Moor. And Cleve did the preaching and Moe'd direct the singing. So eventually he
became interested in doing ministerial work himself when he.... He always wanted to go
back, and I wish he could have, but the war, the Depression came on, and the children came
on, and somehow or another we never did get back.
P: But he used to preach.
R: Yes.
P: In Lake City?
R: In Lake City. He worked more with small congregations and rural congregations because he
always felt like he, especially after we had a big family, it was too much to ask somebody
to support a big family, and so, and then he worked with the black people in Lake City for
quite a while and he worked for small congregations and did this.
P: Karen said that he knew how to make baskets.
R: Yes. Uh huh.
P: Do you know how he did it?
R: No, I don't. I really don't.

SR9A/page 36
P: Fish traps?
R: He, yeah, he made fishnets. He and Karen did some of that, but I never did learn the fine
art of doing that.
P: Okay, I'll ask....
R: He was very creative, just a very creative person.
P: Sdunds like a nice man from what Karen told me too. She really loved him.
R: Yeah, yeah.
P: Did you ever hear any tales of the river such as pirates and gold and steam boats?
R: I heard a story, up from White Springs, there's supposed to be.... Have you gone on that
boat trip out from White Springs?
P: I've been in a canoe there. I haven't gone on a boat trip, but I've been up in a canoe
all up in that area.
R: Well, we'd take the children, and, of course, this is just a tale they told the children.
A certain place up there there's a ship or a something, and according to this -- I can't
remember if it was an Indian boy or an Indian girl; anyway, one or the other -- it was a
boy a white, a white and an Indian fell in love with each other and they wouldn't let them
marry and so one of them jumped in the river and drowned and then the other one saw that
they had jumbed in, they said, they saw him down there with their arms open. The rocks
opened up and the other one jumped down and joined them.
P: Oh, wow.
R: That's off of White Springs. That's the tale they used to tell us when I'd go with, I was
a room-mother a lot of times when my children was in school. Took the children on those
trips.
P: Speaking of Indians, didyou ever hear any stories of Indians from your mother or your
father?
R: No, I never remember any.
P: Did you ever hear any of those other stories of the river? Bootlegging, pirates, gold,
rum-runners?
R: There's supposed to be gold there in the river that was buried there in the Civil War.
In fact, people had gone and dug out from Bell. I believe it was right near Fowler's
Bluff. Recently.

SR9A/page 37
P: Was it from a steamboat or....
R: I think it was boat that they sunk. Evidently it was a steamboat, but I don't think they
were able to find anything. They have found something down there but they have never been
able to get it up out of the water, out of the river.
P: Did you ever see your mother or father talking about the steamboats?
R: Yes. My mother said that when she was young that she and some of her brothers and sisters
went on one of their -- I believe she called it an excursion from Branford to Cedar Keys
on the Belle of the Suwannee and she said that was really, that was really something.
P: Do you remember what she said about it?
R: Oh, she was very pleased. She said they had an excellent time. I think they spent the
night and came back.
P: Now, the steamboats used to bring supplies up the river.
R: Yes.
P: Did they have a bell?
R: Yes, I think they had a bell and a whistle that blew. I understand they had a whistle that
blew. And there were several stops along Gilchrist county that I've heard my parents
talk about. One was Fort Fanning, which was very prominent.
P: Fanning Springs, was that Fanning Springs?
R: Uh huh, at Fanning Springs. The fort was right, you know, the spring has a little run and
the fort goes right there. I think this was a fort during the Seminole War? I'm not
sure about that.
P: Uh huh. That would make sense.
R: Seemed like it was during the Seminole War that that was a fort. I think there's a, there's
a Columbia county, history of Columbia county has something about that in it. And another
place that the steamboat brought the supplies and people met them was at Yular Landing.
That's Y-U-L-A-R is the way the spell it. Yular Landing.
P: Okay. Can you tell me where it is, because that's a town or an area that no longer exists.
R: Exists. That's true. It's a ghost town completely. Well, on the river, it's, it's
about three or four miles north of Heart Springs. And the little town of Yular was about
a mile, mile-and-a-half, I guess, east of there. And of course, lot of the people, pioneers
who settled there during that time would have supplies come in. I remember seeing, when

SR9A/page 38
R: I was a child growing up, of course, you saw wooden boxes, then. You very seldom see a
nice wooden box, now, but I can remember seeing that my father would have a wooden box
and it'd have Yular, Florida on it, you know. Evidently it came down by steamboat. And
another one that was very prominent in that time was Wanee. And then they came in there
and then, of course, Branford. 1Is that, that's not a ghost-town, Wanee.
R: It was at one time, but they have gone down there and are re-building it. I understand
there's some nice homes down there. I don't know. I haven't been down there right
lately. But at one time it was, you know, everything was practically gone. There was a
big sawmill there at one time.
P: Okay. That's what I was going to ask you.
R': At one time it was practically a ghost town, I think, but I understand that they are
subdividing it now, and I hear they're building some nice homes down there.
P: You all ever go on a boat much in the river?
R: No.
P: So it wasn't a commonly used way to travel.
R: No.
P: How about crossing the river to go visit neighbors or....
R: No, but there used to be, at McCrab Ferry which is right down from Heart Springs. Do
you know where that is, McCrab Ferry?
P: I know where Heart Springs is. I don't know where McCrab Ferry is.
R: Well, it's right there at Heart Springs, just, oh, maybe a half a mile. I'm not very good
judging distances, but it's right there at Heart Springs. They used to have a plant there
and I would, had gone with my father. The grist mill was on the other side of the river,
and Mr. White operated the grist mill and they also operated the ferry and you go there,
and could call them, and they would come across and get you and go on the other side and
get your grits and meal ground and they'd bring you back from the other side with the
wagon and buggy. I guess buggy, seems like we were in, on the slats. Then they had oars
that they pulled it across with. It was a on a, was guided by a wire and it'd take you
across.
P: That is something. So the river wasn't really all that important in your every day life.

SR9A/page 39
R: No, not really when I was growing up, it wasn't. I think maybe before my time when they
first went there, when they really depended on it more for supplies, it probably was.
But, you know, when I was growing up, Trenton and Bell were there and we went to those
places.
P: Now, you remember Old Peggy. Can you tell me about that?
R: Oh, yes. When Peggy came to town that was the highlight of the day. Everybody in Bell
had to go out and see Peggy. The children rode to Old Peggy, rode Peggy down to Wanee.
They had a y down there you know. That's where they turn the train around to
river, so they had to turn around there and come back. So they went through Bell and
went down to Wanee and turned the train around and came back. So usually the school
children, that was their field trip, one of their big days, was to get on Peggy and go
to....
P: It was a steam engine.
R: I forgot if it was, but I don't
P: Do you remember when it came, across the
R: Usually around the middle of the day. It was not very punctual, it (laughter) varied from
two or there hours. It was really not very punctual. It brought the mail in and it also
brought supplies for it, and had one passenger coach, I guess.
P: And where did it come from?
R: It came from Starke, let's see, I think it was Starke, High Springs, Williford -- now that's
another ghost town -- we went and talked about Tarheel and Williford.
P: Tarheel?
R: (laughter) Yeah.
P: Why was it called Tarheel?
R: I think it was a sawmill at one time and maybe also it was on the railroad and it was where
they loaded gum that they dipped, you know...
P: Uh huh.
R: ...when they turpentined the trees and they dipped that up and they put it in barrels and I
think that's one of the places that they shipped it from.
P: So they would call that tar?
R: Yeah, uh huh. I guess that's where it got its name of Tarheel.

SR9A/page 40
P: And where are those towns located?
R: Those towns are located east of Bell, between Bell and High Springs,
P: And which one's first?
R: I believe Tarheel is first and then Williford. I'm not absolutely sure about that but I
can
P: Now, do you have other things that you were going to tell me about that you've been think-
ing of? I've asked pretty much much of the questions that I have written down.
R: No. I don't think of anything that I know. You have it covered.
P: Okay. If you think of anything when you are talking to Aunt Lina, you can just interject
it in.
R: Oh, okay. I'll try to think and maybe carry me a pad or something. If she makes me think
of something I'll write it down rather than interupt her, because I general watch her line
of thought as she's talking.
P: It goes away?
R: Uh huh. Yeah.
P: Oh, okay. I'll remember that. Well, do you remember words to your song, "How Not to be
a Rubberneck?" We'll try to get that on here.
R: I know the chorus but I was trying to think how it started. The chorus is, "When there's
something to be seen, don't act silly, don't act green, don't be a rubberneck." When they
sang it it was a quartet, then when they would sing this, somebody, they'd have someone
stationed in the back of the building, probably, to make some big commotion, you know, and
everybody'd look around, and then they'd start singing, "Don't be a rubberneck." They're
cute at that This man that we visited in Cross City the other
day, that was one of the songs that they used to sing. Moe used to sing with them.
P: Okay. Well, I could maybe get the song from him, too.
R: I, I don't know if he would have it outright. I don't know. He might.

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Interviewer: Catherine Puckett Subject: Thelma Lindsey Roberts Place: Jacksonville Beach, FL Date: August 10, 1982 page 1 mjb P: This is Cathy Puckett and I'm interviewing Themla Roberts at her home in Jacksonville Beach. R: Right. P: And the date is August 10, 1982. What is the address here? R: 106 Ninth Avenue South, Jacksonville Beach. P: Okay, when and where were you born? Just basic questions. R: I was born in what was then Alachua county; November 29, 1911; near Heart Springs, which is on the Suwannee River between Bell and Trenton. P: So you've lived, you lived in the Suwannee region all your growing up. R: Yes, uh huh. P: With you, what I think I'd like to do, 'cause you have a lot of stories and you've probably been thinking of different, different things, so I probably won't need to go into all of these questions. Let's see, some of the saying that you used to use, like you were, Sharon was telling me about Fly up. R: (laughter) It's an expression which the chickens fly up and go to roost so people occasionally said when they were going to bed, Let's fly up and go to bed. And another one was, The morning rain is like the old woman's jig; it's soon over. P: That's great. R: Yeah, I think that one's cute. P: What about, you called peanuts... R: Pinders. P: ... pinders. R: Uh huh. Yeah. P: Were there any other names that you had for animals, like pigs? Did you ever hear them called pineywood rooters? R: Yes. Razorbacks. P: Razorbacks?

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pge0 2 R: Yeah. P: Okay. Any other animals that you remember? Woodpeckers? Were they called.... R: No, no, I don't remember anything special about those. P: The sandhills, were they called the sandhills? R: Uh huh. Sandhills. P: Do you know any folk remeies for illnesses? R: Well, I know one, I guess. The cactus that;iyou peal it off, get the thorns off of it and put in on boils or we usually call ri-sings. I don't know how you spell that. Rising -R-I-S-I-N', I guess. And it was supposed to draw it to a head. P: So it was the inside. R: Uh huh. Uh huh. It come out to where it draw the puss to the outside where it would drain. P: That's interesting. R: And another, I think this was 1 ,'!.-;A ;.ng During 1918 -I vaguely remember this -when the soldiers came back from overseas, they brought this flu and of course, the doctors didn't know how to treat it because rural doctors then gave calomel and castor oil, and, which it was before the day of antibiotics, and that was about the only way they knew to treat it, and this was, they tell me, why so many people died, because, boy, when you took that calomel and that castor oil, you, that made you dreadful sick and weak, too, usually, really. But I was saying that to say that my parents especially didn't want us to get it, so every morning when we went to school, we put sulphur in our shoes, how about that? (laughter) Can you imagine how that smelled? But most everyone else did it too, so I guess no one noticed the smell. The main thing was to wear asafedita around your neck. I guess you've heard of that one, probably, where you tie it up in a little cloth and just put it on a string, put it around your neck, and you wore that to ward off colds and flu and.... (laughter) P: Okay, how about remedies for, I'll go down some of these remedies. Stomach aches? Remember? R: Oh, my father kept blackberry wine that we used for upset stomach and that sortof thing. We kept wine, and grape wine, and blackberry wine. We made the wine and kept it in the house all the time. It was used for medicinal purposes.

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SR9A page 3 P: Uh huh. Okay, tootache? Do you have anything special? R: I don't remember anything for toothache. P: Okay. Colds and coughs. R: The asafedita was one and another thing they used was, they made up beeswax, Vick's Salve, it seems to me, or sometimes we used tallow, melted it, put this cloth in it. Oh, I hated the tallow and put a little camphcr in. I don't know what all else and dip this cloth in it and then you wore it around your neck, you know, for chest colds. P: Pinned to your dress. R: Uh huh, or on a string or something tied around your neck so you wouldn't lose it. P: Did you hear it called a taller jacket? R: Yes, I have heard it called that. P: Okay. That's what I've heard it called. R: And one thing that my parents used a whole lots was honey. They had bees and I used to cough a whole lot and they gave us honey for coughs and colds. P: My mom, too, and she's from north Florida. Okay. How about for birthing, for having children, was there any kind of tea or any kind of medicine that they would give? R: I don't think they gave much of anything and used midwives an awful lot. During my time maybe they had doctors, but I can remember them talking about when they had midwives and some of the older people, especially, thought it was ridiculous if you went to doctors for checkups during pregnancy, well, you know, that's just unnatural, and thought that it was just ridiculous to go to the doctor for checkups. P: Uh huh. How about chicken pox or measles? R: Measles, we drank hot sassafrass tea, hot sassafrass tea to break them out and

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SR9A page 4 R: of course, you drank sassafrass tea in the spring of the year, anyway, to build up your blood. P: Okay. R: Yeah. The root, it's a tree that grows;in north Florida and you get the root and boil the root and you, it's, the way I remember it, it's rather tasty because I remember we sweetened and I did put milk in it and it's a red tea and we drank that, but that hot sassafrass tea was supposed to break out measles. P: Okay. I've heard that one. That's good. But I didn't know that they used the root of the tree. R: No, it was the root, yeah. P: Chicken pox, do you remember any? I've heard that you can take a black hen -and it has to be black -and scald it and then bathe the child in the broth. R: I've never, I've never heard that. Now, I've heard for shingles. P: Uh huh. R: You know shingles are supposed to come in your abdom'al area and if they go all the way around you and meet, it's supposed to kill you. That's what older people used to think. And the remedy for that was to kill a black chicken and they cut it's head off and while the blood was warm, let the warm blood run on the shingles. (laughter) I never saw it done... P: Uh huh. R: ... but I heard people talk about doing it. P: That's something. R: Yeah. P: Okay, for cramps, for women? R: I don't know.... P: Haven't heard any? R: No, I don't. I don't know any. P: Warts? R: Oh, warts, frogs was supposed to cause warts and what was supposed to take them off? Someone who was born after a frog had died, I believe. They could take them off by some _word they said, or something,

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SR9A/page 5 P: I haven't heard that one. That's interesting. Do you remember the word? R: I don't. No, I don't. P: Well, well you said the cactus for boils. Were there other rememdies for boils? R: Uh huh. P: Turpentine, did you ever.... R: The other, the other, what was the other remedy? The, it was something. I can't remember right now, what it was. Oh, sometimes they put fat meat on it. P: Uh huh. R: Just what they called fat back. Put fat meat on it, just a piece of real fat meat on the boil and.... P: Any kind of meat or red meat? R:, Fat, no, it has to be white, fat meat. P: Okay. R: And you put that on the boil. I think the idea was to bring the puss to a head so they could open it and the puss would drain out. P: Okay. For snake bites? R: Whiskey. (laughter) P: You drink whiskey and then.... R: Yeah, drink whiskey and if it was on your limb anywhere, why, of course, you cut the place in an x, I suppose, and then sucked it, sucked the poison out and then bandage it or put a tourniquet on it between the where the bite was and your body. P: Wow. Okay. Sore throat? R: Oh, we took. I guess we mostly for sore throat and honey. P: How about arthritis or sore muscles or sore bones? R: Watkin's Liniment. (laughter), You put that much of that and you.... We had a Watkins dealer that came through the country. I don't know if anyone's told you that tale or not. P: No. R: But this dealer came through the community and evidently he did quite well. He'd spend the night at our house occasionally. I think he lived in Alachua. But he would just go and hit every farm house and he carried, you know, medicinal supplies and flavorings and

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SR9A/page 6 R: things of that sort. P: Spices. R: Spices, uh huh. And he had a big red bottle of Watkin's liniment and he has a white liniment, too, but that was the remedy atiour house whether anything, any sore muscle or any of that. P: It just rubbed on. R: Rubbed on. Uh huh. P: Did he come in a wagon or.... R: Well, when I remember he came in a car. P: Okay. Let's see. High blood pressure? R: None of my people have ever had that. I really don't know. P: Insect bites of mosquito bites? R: I don't know much about the bite, but I guess we were so accustomed to those that we just scratched it and let it go, but to keep mosquitoes out of the house when we didn't have screens, we would take a pan and put old rags, old clothes in it, you know, and put sulphur on it and before we'd go to bed at night put that in there where it would just smolder and smoke. P: Uh huh. So you would set it on fire. R: Uh huh, uh huh. Yes. P: And you'd put it near the window or.... R: Put it, just put it out in the middle of the room and let it smoke and keep the mosquitoes, couldn't stand it, I guess, and you couldn't either hardly when you went in. P: That's interesting. I haven't heard that. Okay. What was your house like that you were born in and grew up in? P: Well, the house that I grew up in, I think, was a typical farmhouse of that country. They had two big rooms, a hall through the middle and a chimney at either end. One room was a parlor and it had the organ in it and we had two fancy rockers in there and had a big fancy big wooden bedstead, high wooden bedstead and marble topped dresser and of course, you didn't go in there except maybe on Sunday or if you had company, why you went in there and sat in there in that room and then it had two, three bedrooms. Had a bedroom on the front porch, off the front porch was a bedroom. Then the kitchen hacd c kitchen and dnim$ng

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SR9A/page 7 R: room and a pantry. P: Your kitchen -did it have a stove in it or did.... R: Yeah. We had a wood stove. We used wood altogether. P: For cooking and for heating. R: Yeah, what heat you had in the kitchen. P: Okay. Did you have fire places in the bedrooms? R: Yes. Well, we, well, in these two rooms we did. But in the other rooms we did not. P: OkC., Were your chimneys built with sticks or.... R: Our chimney was built with salt rock. Some of them were built with moss and clay and sticks. And sometimes the moss, the clay would was out, the rain, and would leave the moss and occasionally would cause a fire. The moss would catch fire. But the house that I grew up in, it had, the rocks were sewn out of the.... P:' Probably Suwannee Limestead. R: Probably, yeah, probably was. P: Okay. Your mattresses on your bed -what were they stuffed with? R: They were made with cotton, but they were made et home. They were hand-made. P: Uh huh. Do you rer.ember doing that? R: I remember, vaguely remember helping my mother some, do it. They ginned the cotton and they brought it home and we had this, I guess cards, that we did the cotton, tried to get all the dirt out of it and made the mattress out of it. P: That's interesting. R: And a fctbr'bed, each, the goal of each homemaker to have a feather bed on every bed. That was.... P: So they would save all the feathers from chickens. R: Well, you know the way they got the feathers, they had geese. And they took the geese and took their feet and nailed them to a board with a staple and picked them and then turned them lose. They did this, I guess, in the late spring. And then, you know, by winter they would..... P: Have a new coat. R: ... have a new coat. P: Wow. I never knew that.

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SR9A/page 8 R: I never saw that done, but I've heard the old people talking about it. But that's the way we did it. And some people did have geese. We never had geese, but P: So they wouldn't use chicken feathers for stuffing a bed? R: I don't think so. I don't think they were practical. I don't they they were, you know, the down, they didn't have enough of that, there were too much of the feathers in it. That it really wasn't that practical. Yeah, I don't think it was that practical. P: Okay. Was most of your furniture home-made? R: No. Our furniture was not. Our dining room table was home-made and we had benches on either side of the table where the children sat, and of course, the adults sat in chairs, but, you know, the furniture in the bedrooms was bought furniture. We had iron bedsteads. P: What would a typical day have been like when you were growing up? I guess if you could tell me a little bit about your family, your father and' mother. R: Well, I was the second family. My father had been married before and the second time he married -which was my mother -he had children older than my mother, which, I guess, brought on some problems no doubt with the older children, seeing as their father there with young children coning on when he was sixty and seventy years old. We had a big 530-acre farm, lots of cows. P: Near Heart Springs. R: Near Heart Spring. We had a small spring in the corner of our pasture, Heart Spring, and of course, I saw four sisters, no brothers. Had a little brother that died in infancy. And, of course, my father being old, why he had to help him with some of the family chores around the house because he was not well enough, not strong enough to do all of them, so because of that, we did help some with the chores on the farm. P: How old was your father when he got married to your mother? R: I.... P: And how old was your mother? R: Let's see. I think he was sixty and my mother was twenty-six. P: And what were their names? R: My father's name was William Crawford Lindsey. My mother's name was Minnie Lee Slokum and she had been married to Clemens and he died. P: And she was pregnant, is that right, when she married?

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SR9A/page 9 R: No. P: Oh, okay. R: What you're thinking about, perhaps, is she was pregnant with a child when her first husband died. P: That's what I meant. R: She died before, I mean, her first husband died before the child was born. P: So there was a lot of age difference between the two. R: Yeah. I'm sure that it was, I've often thought about my mother, had a tendency sometimes to feel sorry for herself. I guess I would have, too, if I had had the experiences that she had. She, I understand that her parents did not want her to marry the boy that she married the first time. P: Uh huh. R: But she married him against their will and then she was pregnant with their first child and he had pneumonia, pneumonia, had typhoid fever, I believe, which at that time was a very serious disease because they did not have the medication to control it that they should have and then she had to go back home before the child was born and her other brothers and sisters were there, which I'm sure, made it not as pleasant as it could have been. And she married my father and there was all the older children there saying, What's my daddy doing marrying this young woman and all these children coming along here? P: How old was your father when he had his last child? R: He was seventy-five. (laughter) P: So he, how old did he live to? R: He was eighty-four. P: Eighty-four. R: Uh huh. P: And you were born? R: In 1911. P: 1911. So you remember him pretty well. R: Oh, yes, yes. I was married, in fact. P: When he died. R: When he died, I was married. Yes. I had one child when he died.

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SR9A/rj b P: Well, when you got up in the morning, did you do a lot of chores or,... R: Yes, we usually did. As I said, there were no boys to do it, and my father was old. We had to help with taking care of the animals on the farm and the cows. We learned to milk cows and sometimes had to help him take care of the horses. Usually kept two horses and had a wagon and a buggy. P: Uh huh. R: Which was our transportation. I guess we bought our first car on '26. P: Do you remember -oh, the question went out of my head. What kind of crops did you grow? R: We grew mostly corn, peanuts, and velvet beans. The velvet beans were for the cows to eat in the winter time. They were, grew on a vine and they'd run up around the cornstalks. And later he did grow some watermelons, but mostly corn and peanuts for all the animEils to eat. P: And what about your family? Did you grow staple crops for the family to eat? R: Yes. We had a garden most of the time. We had vegetables in our garden. JIn the summer, of course, we had corn and peas and tomatoes and all those good things. Okra. Then in the winter time we would have collards and mustard. P: How did you store ycur food? R: Well, didn't have much way of storing it, except what did can. We canned quite a bit of food and cured the meat. It was smoked on up in the smokehouse and cured, salted down for so long and then it was washed off and hung up in the smokehouse and cured. P: Did you have cane, sugar cane? R: Yes. Oh, I used to love to come home from school and gc out to the cane patch and cut down a cane in the fall and sit out there and chew cain. That was good. P: Did you use that for your own supply of sugar cane syrup and for making sugar? R: Mostly for making cane syrup. Occasionally dad made some sugar, but not very often. P: So did you usually use honey for sweetening? R: We used a lot of honey for sweetening, uh huh. P: You had bees. R: Yes, we had bees. Not everyone had bees, but we did have some bees. P: Did you have sugar cane parties?

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SR9A/page 11 R: I had cane-grinding parties. P: Cane-grinding parties. R: Where you pull candy. Oh, the boys would put the candy, the syrup in your hands and it would be hot, the candy. You have to start pulling it while it's warm, if you've ever seen taffy, you know. Well, you pull it while it's warm. P: How does it work? Did you have a mule or something? R: Yeah, that.... P: Can you describe it? R: Well the cane mill was in the center and you had a long pole and a horse, mule, a horse fastened to it and it had a lead on it. I don't know if we should call it a board, and you fastened this to the horse's head and then fastened him up to the pole and he just went round and round, all day, poor thing. And someone.... P: R: They had put the corn, they had put the cane in the mill and usually had a barrel to catch the juiceiand had a cloth of some kirc to strain the juice to keep the, you know, the dirt and different things from going in it. P: And then you would boil it and make cane syrup? R: Then put it in the sugar kettle and boil it down to where it was syrup. P: Uh huh. And you would make candy when it was real hot. R: The candy you got off of the side of the kettle just before they took the syrup up. You get your cane peeling and scrape it off and eat it. P: Okay. What did you do for fun, for relaxation?. R: Well, we, course we built, didn't have many close neighbors and we had to be very creative to do, you know, had to do things ourselves, played ball and did have some neighbors that came over occasionally and then we would play ball or play drop the handkerchief or ringaround-the-rosey or something of that sort. P: Uh huh. Did you go fishing? R: Yes, we went fishing. Dad usually took us fishing on Friday or Saturday, we went. P: Down to Jack Springs, most of the time, cause that was in our pasture and we felt like we were at home down there I guess. And you could caught some fish down there 'cause a lot

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SR9A/page 12 R: of people didn't fish there, if you didn't people out and caught some fish down there. P: Catfish? R: No, we had all kind of fish. Brim, Caught some catfish, but mostly brim. P: Did you every hear of anyone dynamiting? R: Yes, I sure have. P: Do you know any stories about dynamiting? I remember you telling me one last week? R: Well, I knew one boy, I knew this boy real well. He was down at Heart Springs and climbed up in a tree. They dynamited mullet because mullet, they tell me, don't bite a hook very well, and in that clear water, sometimes, there's schools of mullet come up there and oh, there'll just be a big school of them, and as clear as crystal you can see them. So he had climbed;upiin one of the cypress trees there and was going to dynamite them which was illegal, but a lot of people did it anyone. Especially before we had our game and fresh water fish commission, like we did. But he was up in the tree and dipped the dynamite. For some reason, he thought it wasn't going off. You know how dynamite, how they do it, it has a fuse on it, like a firecracker and he thought it had gone out and so he attempted to light it again, is what they thought happened and it went off in his hand, knocked him out of tree and they said blew him to pieces. P: So he died. R: Oh, yes. He was dead before he hit the, I'm sure, before he hit the water. P: So did they do try to dynamite to try to get a lot of fish? It would kill.... R: Yeah. It would kill a lot of fish. I don't know. My folks never did dynamite. They said it was illegal, but I know it was done a whole lots. But they tell me that the fish were really not that good that were dynamited, that they were not that tasty. It did something to them... P: Uh huh. R: ... when they were dynamited. P,: R: When they were killed by dynamite, I'm not sure they . ._ P: (laughter) Church was probably very important. R: Oh, yes. You looked forward to that because that was, that was your social life to a

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SR9A/page 13 R: great extent. Your world was very small. About ten or fifteen miles. P: Uh huh. R: We went to my grandfather's which was twenty-five miles away, it took us about eight or nine hours to go. P: Where did he live? R: He lived over in Suwannee county near Branford. P: And iwhatlwas his name? R: Jesse Slokum. P: So it took eight or nine hours to get there. R: Uh huh, uh huh. P: And church, where was the church that you went to? R: Midway Church of Christ in Gilchrist county. P: How long did it take you to get to church? R: Well, we were not very far from church. We lived about a mile from church, so it didn't take very long, really, to go to church. P: Did most of the neighbors in that area all go to this church? R: Yes. It was quite, very prominent in that area, that most everybody, roost everybody around there were family. They were either related some way or another and most of the people did. P: So you would go to church on Sunday morning? R: Uh huh, uh huh. P: Sunday evening? R: A lot of times didn't go on Sunday evening, just had the Sunday morning service. P: And then you would probably have a Sunday dinner. R: Yeah, that's, we had a Sunday dinner. Right. P: And then you would go to church on Wednesday. R: When I was growing up, we really didn't. Sunday morning was really about the only time that we went to church. P: What was Sunday dinner like? What kind of foods did you eat? R: Oh, that was when you had all the good things. You'd probably go out on the yard and kill a chicken and that was a delicacy. That's, you didn't have chicken every day like we do now sometimes, !e would kill a chicken and dress it and have chicken and rice or

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SR9A/page 14 R: chicken and dumplings, chicken and dressing, along with other vegetables. P: Uh huh. And corn bread? R: Corn bread. Yes, I've had some corn bread, P: You didn't have white bread very much? R: No, no light bread. Now I car remember when I first began to see light bread. P: Even with the.... R: I don't know when it was. It must have been in the twenties, I guess, that it come out. Corn bread and biscuits. Get up every morning, bake biscuits for breakfast and for breakfast have sausage and grits and biscuits, syrup. P: Sounds great. So you usually had a pretty substantial breakfast. R: Yes. P: Did you usually have eggs, too? R: Eggs, yes. We usually had eggs. We had chickens on the farm, so we had all them eggs. P: And then you would eat your main meal at lunchtime. R: Yes, that was the main meal, and then usually ate what was left over, especially if you'd cooked a big pot full of peas and corn and different things for you noonday meal, why, then, you ate what was left over, and if you had -which we always did -cows and milk, why, clabber. P: I've heard of it. R: It's milk when it sours. P: Okay. R: What yogurt is just, I sometimes say, just glorified clabber. P: Uh huh. (laughter) R: See, you know, of course it has some seasoning in it. But ate that at night, lots with, and sweetened it with syrup. P: Uh huh. R: Put syrup in it and had that along with your leftover, leftovers from the noonday meal. Especially in the summertime when the weather was hot. We very seldom cooked at night, unless, you know, it was a special occasion or something. P: Okay. So clabber was a sweet kind of desert.

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SR9A/page 15 R; No, it was, well it, you used it like you would buttermilk. P: Okay. R: Or put it in a glass and stir it up and put some syrup in it. P:. Okay. R: You've never seen clabber? P: No. R: Oh! P: I've heard of it. Probably from my mother, but I have not seen it. Where did you go to get supplies, things 1;ke cloth or spices or nails? R: Trenton or Bell, and my mother ordered a lot of cloth and things that we from mail-order houses. That was, and we'd have to meet the mail carrier and be sure that he got them because the mail carrier didn't go to everyone's house. He'd come inside of the house, perhaps, but you'd know about when to expect him to come, so you'd have to, I've waited many days to, for the mail carrier to come and maybe he'd bring a package and, of course, you were so excited when the pacakge came and you had something new. P: Did you go with your father to town, to the store? R: Yes. He usually took some of us. He was very kind and considerate and he usually took some of us. P: Did you go by wagon? R: By buggy. P: How long did it take to get to Trenton or Bell? R: Well to take the trip to Trenton or Bell would be -I don't know -I'd say two or three hours anway. Bell was eight miles and Trenton was ten, a little bit closer to Bell than it was to Trenton, but Trenton had the bigger shopping area, bigger variety. P: A little while ago you were telling me i story about your father sitting on the wagon with his whip. R: Sitting on the horse. P: On the horse. R: Horse. Had a lot of cows and in the spring and summer they would be, let them go in the swamp and, you know, feed. Then he would bring them up in the wintertime and he'd have something that he'd brought in the fields for them, so he'd go hunt the cows and bring then

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SR9A/16 R: up and I've heard my half-brother say it was a sixteeni-foot whip. I don't know. I know it wa: a long one. I thought then it was a long one. But he would sit on old Lil and pop that cow whip and he could really make it pop. I think the only time he ever whipped me was one morning I was getting dressed for school and he was bringing, he was changing some cows around some way and he told me to open a gate and I was a little bit slow getting out there and cows got away and he had to go back and run them down. So it was too bad for me when he gct the cows all situated. That's the only time I ever remember rly father spanking me. F: Giving you a whipping. R: Yeah. (laughter) P: Now, you said your father remembers hearing the guns at the battle of Olustee? R: Yes. Uh huh. P: Can you tell me about that? R: He was in Lake City at that time. Heard the guns. He wasn't old enough to be in the regular army, but he was in the home guard and they drafted all of them to help take care of the widows and children and the wounded soldiers. They had a hospital in Lake City for the wounded soldiers. And these younger boys had to haul supplies tc them and see that the women and children, as much as they could, had something to eat and were taken care cf. And he was hauling supplies and there was some noise, a distraction of some kind and the horse jurped and ran away with him. He started to get in the wagon, had to spin up on the wheel and the horse jumped and it threw him down and dragged him and broke his leg and it really was never fixed or anything like it should have been fixed. Father didn't as long as he lived, I guess he should have. I don't know if he could have done anything about it or not, but I know it bothered him some 'cause he limped. P: Did he ever talk about the Civil War? R: Oh, yeah. I wish I had written down all the tales that he told us about it, but he talked a lots about that. Especially as he got older, he talked more and more about it. P: Do you remember any stories that he told? R: That's about-the only one I remember any of them talking about him being there and hearing the guns and of course, they were all frightened. P: Did he ever talk of slaves?

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SR9A/page 17 R: Yes, he remembered when his parents had slaves and, of course, some of the slaves stayed with their masters and they had good masters. After they were freed, why they had no place to go, they really fared better to stay with their masters than they did to try to get out on their own because they had no where to go and nothing to do with, so I've heard him say that some of theirs stayed with them. He used to tell a tale about when they had someone, a big, black Negro, and said he had the prettiest white teeth that he had ever seen. Of course, their teeth, you know, always shine against their black skin. He said this Negro didn't have a toothbrush, but said, everytime he washed his face he took his finger and washed his teeth with his finger. (laughter) Can you imagine that? I've never seen anyone do that! He also told a tale one time about he and one of the slaves -I think this was a young boy -were going to get the horses and they saw a bear, and they, of course, were frightened. They started trying to run and the slave boy had his bridle and he got tangled up in the reins and fell down. Oh, and daddy said he almost died and I'm sure I would've probably if I had seen a bear coming iand had fallen down. P: Do you remember the slave's name? R: No, I don't. No, I don't. No, I don't have any, I've heard him say, too, I've heard him say what their names were, but I don't remember what they were. P: Did he say the slaves were well-treated? R: Some of them were and some of them were not. Now, he said their slaves were, of course, up until, were good to their slaves. P: Were these slaves on this property or in Lake City? R: No, these, these slaves, I think, were in South Carolina. See, my father came from South Carolina... P: Okay, okay. R: ... to this area, and I think this was really before they left South Carolina that they had the slaves. P: Uh huh. That's interesting. What did he think of the Civil War? Do you remember him saying? R: I don't remember that he ever expressed himself in regard to the Civil War. P: Uh huh. This is really interesting. Did you ever hear talk, a few people in a couple of areas have said that after slaves were outlawed that people still had slaves? Did you ever hear any tAli: of that?

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SR9A/page 18 R: Yes. Like I said that my father, some of them stayed on, but they did it willingly. I think it's interesting, out from Lake City there's a family, quite a section, an area, community, I guess would be a better word, of black people. They're very thrifty farmers, grow tobacco and they're very affluent. Their names are Watson and they go back to a family that had them, you know, during slavery and when they left, they were freed, why, of course, they took their owners' name because they had no name except Jim or John or whatever their first name was, you know. So they took their owners' name and these, these, this community out there still go by the name of Watson. P: Really? R: Uh huh. P: That's something. Are there any people who have, are very old or could remember like their fathers and mothers? R: I don't know if there is or not. I don't, I really don't know if there is or not. I don't know them that well. I know they grow tobacco and I've heard -Leo worked the tobacco market on year End I always talk about him bringing the tobacco. I know they're considered very thrifty and I've heard this tale told... P: Very good people. R: ... uh huh, more times than one about this is where they got their name is from there. P: R: P: Did you, well, did people tell stories a lot when you were growing up, for entertainment? Like now we watch TVs and.... R: Yes. I think people visited more and talked more with families, visited more and talked more. Our father went to school back when you had to pay to go to school and he had a brother that didn't like school very well, and he told us that one time his mother, who was a widow-woman, had rayed for his younger brother to go to school and he wouldn't go, so my father went to school instead and he, he was fairly well-educated and he liked to read. He used to read Bible stories. We really didn't have much reading material. Pi' Not many books available. R: No, not many books available, We really didn't have much. But were all, my mother .rd father both loved to read and they were always reading to us something. P: How about singing?

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SR9A/page 19 R: Yes, on Saturday night especially I had a half-sister that played the pi--, the organ, the old pump organ, you know that you peddle. We'd gather in, the neighbors and she would play the organ and we would have, they would sing, Lsually hymns, you know. P: Uh huh. R: And they'd stand around and sing. Some good singers. P: Yeah. I heard some of those people at the church. On the subject of stories -do you remember any tall tales or tales that you heard, like hunting or stories that your father had, or haunted houses or famous people? R: I remember when I grew up over on the Suwannee River, out from there was Noolsey a house that was supposed to be haunted. It was called the N House. I never did know why it was supposed to be haunted. The only reason that I knew it was just had stood there for several years vacant. It was a beautiful, two-story home and when I was in school, why, this was one of the main attractions on weekends to go over to the Woolsey House, to the haunted 'cuse and I never did go. (laughter) P: Oh. Where did you go to school? R: I went to school at, well, my first schooling was at Suwannee. It was a little twoteacher school ano' it's gone now. There's nothing there. I don't think that, it's probably just a field. P: Is it a community? Was that a community? R: I guess it was named Suwarnee because of the river, is the only reason I know, because the community is not called Suwannee P: Okay. R: I don't know if you care about this or not, but an interesting thing in my family, my sister younger than I, was two years younger than I and when we went to school we didn't go but six months out of the year and you had to buy your books. Everybody bought their books. Go from, usually July to December, because of the farmers -they'd start farming in January and by July everything was pretty well over with, so first year after I was in the primer -.of course we had only one or two books to read out of; didn't have all the material to work with now that you have -so my sister and I, we'd play school and she

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SR9A/page 20 R: learned it in a short time to where she knew it as well as I did, so she'd be the teacher part cf the time and I'd be the teacher part of the tire, so we learned it and the next year, she still wasn't old enough to go to school, and I was in the second grade, and of course, I had a speller and arithmetic, a little bit, two more books that year, a reader, but the next summer she and I played school again and she learned all the books, learned all the words, learned how to spell and how to work the arithmetic. That's about all we had to do, so in hot weather, we'd do that. Sc when time come to go to school, of course she started, and they put her in the primer for the first grade and they hand an old chart, a big old chart they used, and she knew it from memory. She could say it backwards and forwards, so then they put her, she stayed in here a few days and they saw that she knew that, so then they put her in the second grade where she knew it as well she did the other because we'd just gone over it that summer, so in less than a month's time she was in the third grade with me and she and I went through school in the same grade. P: Oh, that's really neat. That's something. R: She taught school, then when she got out. She taught school for forty-something years. P: Which sister is this? R: This is Merle. P: Okay. R: She's the one, she died in, just about a month before did. She lived in Virginia. P: Okay. R: She's the one that taught so long,.. P: Right, you told me. R: ... that me and Avers mentioned that day, you know... P: Uh huh. R: ... we was talking about and the lady that was sitting at the next table, I don't know if you mentioned, she mentioned about Merle, asked me about if I was Merle's sister. P: She taught sixth grade. R. Uh huh. Right. Sixth grade. P: (laughter)

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SR9A/page 21 R: She and Ruby had something on the sixth grade. P: And Karen Xow on kindergarten. This is getting to the end. I'm going to have to.... R: ... because I'm sure not doing a very good job here. P: Oh, yeah, you are. It's really interesting. And if you have certain things that you've been thinking about that you want to tell me, just butJright in. R: I always thought that was interesting about Merle. She was a very.scholarly person, very studious person. She, you know, learned real quickly. P: Yeah. We used to play school, too, little kids. (laughter) R: I think most children do. I guess P: And later on we stopped lot of it. Let's see. Did you ever hear tales about moonshiners? R: Oh, yes. I surely did. P: Do you remember any? R: Yes. When I taught school, when I was sixteen years old, the people that I boarded with.... P: Where did you teach school? R: I taught school at a little school out from Live Oak. Falmouth. It was on the Suwannee Riverand the people over there, that seemed to be one of the pasttimes over there and I think the people that I roomed with, that I boarded with, they would leave home about the time that the rest of us were starting to go to bed and they'd come home about the time we got up every morning, and I thought it was so strange where my father was always home at night and I thought this was so strange. So before I left there was a nice family in the neighborhood and asked me to come up and room with them and they asked me didn't I know that so-and-so ran moonshine, and of course, I was naive, a sixteen-year-old girl, I said, I didn't know. I said, No, I didn't know what they were doing. They said, Well, they were some of the biggest moonshiners in this whole area. (laughter) P: Was moonshining common? R: Yes, very common. And especially out in back, backward areas, I think. And this was a backward area on the Suwannee River. This was a one-teacher school. P: Did they ever have revenues come in? Did you ever hear stories of revenues breaking

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SR9A/page 22 P: up into stills? R: Well, I have some. But not anything right now that's very interesting. P: Uh huh. R: About my school teaching when I was sixteen years old, I had this little girl that was Sweedish descent and she had very, she had a deep voice, and, of course, I was sixteen years old. No training. I hadn't even finished high school. I don't know why they let me teach school, but anyway, they did. But, you called everyone up to the front, to the recitation bench and you you gave head marks, and, of course, if you spelled a word, why you could go ahead of the other person. So this little girl, she was a very studious little girl. I remember giving her out the word "swan" and she said, S-W-A-A-N. No that isn't right. S-W-A-A-N. So I let the next person below her turn her down and she was so heartbroken because someone had turned her down. And then and then write the word and she came up there and it finally dawned on my that that was the way she was pronouncing "w": (laughter) P: Oh, no. R: Poor thing. I felt sorry for her so many times since then. P: That's funny. How many children did you teach? R: I didn't have very many. Probably thirty, thirty-five. Had grades through the sixth, I believe. P: Wow. R: Had some boys in there older than I was and taller. P: Was that a problem? R: No, theyminded. We didn't have any problem. P: Uh huh. R: Because they was just in short-term school then. P: Yeah. R: Rural area. P: I don't know if you would have heard any hunting or animal stories. R: No, my half-brother, you met, Albert's the one that was at the reunion the other with the walker, he used to do a lot of hunt, hunting squirrels, but I don't know any, anything of any.

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SR9A/page 23 P: What was a holiday dinner like, or Christmas or Thanksgiving? How did you celebrate? R: Well, I think, very much like we would today. Probably didn't get as, children didn't get as many toys as they did now. We, I can remember, we a lot of times got apples and oranges and candy in our stockings and all, usually got one or two nice toys, but had some stuffers, you know, things in there, just apples and oranges because we didn't have fruit all the time and that sort of thing, but the Christmas dinner, we usually had, well we had some turkeys on the farm, too, and we sometimes had a turkey or a big hen, or, you know..... P: Would you make dishes for a long time before Christmas? Pumpkin pies? R: On, you'd start, yeah, start baking, you know, two or three days, and bake an bake. P: What were traditional Christmas dishes or pies? R: We usually had a fruitcake and pies, my mother made a lot of sweet potato pies. I don't know if you've eaten sweet potato pies. P: I love it. And I want to see if you have the recipe, if you have any recipes. R: I think I have a recipe in there for a sweet potato pie and they were good and pumpkin pies, you'd gather your pumpkin from the fall of the year, and most people just put them in with the corn in the corn crib and they used corn like they used all kind of pumpkin, so a lot of times, especially Thanksgiving, you'd have the pumpkin pie and just There wasn't really that much difference, I guess, in what we would have today. P: Let's see. Were neighbors very important? R: Very important. Yeah, they were very important because, your, as I said before, yourworld was very small and your neighbors, maybe your neighbor would be a full mile. P: Uh huh. R: But it was interesting, in the evening, you could usually hear the boys in the neighborhood calling cows or a'hollering and someone else would answer them. P: Uh huh. I bet that felt nice. Would neighbors help out, like say, if a farmer got ill, or in building a house. Was that kind of thing common? R: Yes, it was. I remember one time my father was ill in the spring of the year. Of course, he was an older person and wasn't able to get his land ready to plan and someone organized a group and they came in and, oh, I don't know, must have been eight or ten came in and

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SR9A/page 24 R: in just a days' time, of course they prepared a lot of land and got it ready to plant so he really wasn't that far behind once.... P: So that kind of thing was common. R: Yeah, very common. P: And could save a family, essentially. R: Yes, that's true. P: Did you feed all the men or.... R: Yes, we fixed a feast. P: Did the women come along with them? R: Mostly just the men. Maybe if it was a very close acquaintance that the woman might come along, but mostly the men. I know that's the way it was at our house that time. That's the only real experience that I had with that, but I know this time. And of course, we cooked for about two days trying to get, and fixing and getting pies and cakes and in the morning they came, why, we cooked up a big meal and had it ready for them. P: Right. That's nice. R: Something about the preserving of the meat, the backbone, the ribs and the boney pieces of the meat, they would take that and put it in a pot of lard and let it fry till it would, those you know, it was fried brown and then they would cook that in a crock, big old stone crocks and cover it with lard, and that would keep. It wouldn't spoil if you would fried it good and brown ,put it in those crocks and cover it with your lard, your hog lard, 'cause that's what you used. And, oh, I can remember coming home, maybe after you'd worked and been out helping dad do something and my mother would have some of that meats taken out that of that and put it in the oven and get it hot, good, and hot... P: Uh huh. R: ... well, they'd just let it get good and hot and melt all the grease off of it and maybe bake some sweet potatoes. Oh, nothing will ever taste as good as that did. I'm sure it wouldn't taste like I imagine the taste even if I tasted it now, but I would think that was some of the best. P: Did you have a name for it? R: No, they just took the bones and fried them up and....

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SR9A/page 25 P: And it's the bones, R: Uh huh. The backbone, and the ribs and the boney parts, P: But they left meat on it. R: Yeah, yeah. They, it wasn't like you'd by at the market now. They was really, they left meat on it. P: So, did you keept it in the smokehouse or.... R: Yeah, had the smokehouse, uh huh. P: Okay. R: Had a shelf with the crocks, I wish we had kept some of our old crocks. I don't have the first one. I don't know where they are.1 P: Oh, that would be nice. R: Yeah. And, of course, everyone had, or most people did, my father did, had a number of big old crocks that we put our lard and things like that in. P: How did you keep ants or bugs out of your food, like in the smokehouse, or your honey or your sugar? R: Well, in the smokehouse, they salted it, they just covered it with salt, they just put salt all over it and then when they, let it stay like that, I don't know how long -a week, two weeks, ten days, something -they take and take it in a pot of hot water and dip it in that and smoke it and then they'd hang it up and build a little fire under itAuntil it was smoked brown and of course, you know, well, there wasn't very -what did they call that bug that got into there? Skippers. P: Yeah, I've heard of that. R: Skippers would sometimes get in the meat and they'd have to take it out in the sun and cut it all out, you know, and burn it, and get them out of the meat. But I can't remember us having much problem with ants and..... We had a stove that had a warming closet, I mean, you know what that is, that hole in.... And we put that food up, usually, put the food in the afternoon up in that and nothing bothered it and, of course, if you had vegetables left over, you usually just left them in the pot that you'd cooked them in on the stove. P: What is a warming closet, now? R: It's a range and it has a....

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SR9A/page 26 P: Shelf? R: Yeah, uh huh. And it has doors. Lindsey's, that stove of Lindsey's has one. P: Okay. I have not been over to his house. I'll look and see. R: Next time you go to Lindsey's house, why, you look in that upstairs where, I think Anne has spices and things in it. P: Uh huh. R: That's, that's the warming closet. P: Gee, that's neat. Oh, okay. Here's some things, too. Are any animals, birds, snakes, etc., associated with bad luck or good luck or are there things that you recall about animals? Like I've heard if you dream about fish it means somebody in your family is going to get pregnant. R: No, I don't know. P: Or if an owl hoots after dark, someone's ill. R: Seems like I have heard that one. But I haven't heard that about the fish. And I'm sure you know about the black cat and the ladder. P: Uh huh. How about getting-married sayings. I've heard if you get up from the table and knock your chair over you won't get married. R: That's true. Or if you let somebody sweep under your feet, you won't get married that year. (laughter) I don't remember any more right now. P: Do you remember any dreams that are supposed to mean anything? R: If you dream of a marriage it's supposed to indicate there is going to be a death in the family. P: Of a marriage? R: Uh huh. P: Gee, okay. R: You're not supposed to start any work on Friday unless you could finish it on Friday. They thought it was bad luck. You'd die before you finished it. P: Gee, I haven't heard that one. R: I heard that one some, some of these days. If you can think about it and ask Lina something

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SR9A/page 27 R: about these old 'cause she'll probably remember some of those... P: Okay. R: ... much better than I. Pi' Okay. These are mostly hunting questions. Oh, with fish, now did you ever get fish from the Gulf when you were growing up? R: Uh huh. P: Did you trade? R: Yeah. It was a very common practice in the fall for people to, sometimes they would go in groups. They would put covers on their wagons and go down to the Gulf and they would carry potatoes and meal or lard or meat and carry it down there, swap it to the fisherman for fish. P: In the town of Suwannee. R: Well, from where we lived they went to Horseshoe mostly? P: Uh huh. R: You been to Horseshoe? P: Uh huh. R: Well, that's where they went then, most of the time. And then they'd big the fish back, lug it, back to going when the yellow roe were in and we'd get those and then they'd salt those and make a brine like and preserve those. We had to take them out at night and soak them overnight in water and get the salt out of them and then we'd eat them, but you didn't salt P: Uh huh. And would you get like smoked mullet? Would you trade for fish also, not just roe, but for fish? R: Yeah, you'd get the fish and the mullet, I mean the roe would be in the mullet, see. P: Oh, okay. R: You would dress them and get the roe out. P: What other things do you remember trading for in the beach area or the Gulf area? Other kinds of fish. R: Mullet's about the only thing that I remembered that we ever got. P: Did you go over there ever with your father? R: One time was all that I ever went. We planned to go another time, but it came up a

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SR9A/page 28 R: hurricane and, I don't know, we got torn off and we didn't go. P: How long did it take to get to Horeshoe? R: Oh, it takes, used to get to spend the night on the way over there. And, of course, the people who went all the time, they knew where the springs of fresh water were, and they'd go and plan to camp there, and then go on the next day and camp. They'd just stay a day or two, maybe two days, and then come. It'd take about a week to go and come back. P: Gee, that's really interesting. You know what crawdads are, crayfish? R: Uh huh. P: Did you ever eat those or catch those? R: I've eaten them but... P: Not in Florida. R: ... not if Florida. I P: Catfish stew? Someone was telling me that your husband knew how to make it. R: Yeah. If the cat, if the fish were very large, they saved the heads, they cleaned the heads, took their eyes out and boiled their heads and made stew. P: How do you make it? What else did you put in it? R: My folks never did save the heads that much. I've seen and heard other people talk that did, but my folks really didn't. There really isn't that much on them except seasoning, I guess you'd get some seasoning out of it to boil the heads. Well, you boil it, and of course. it doesn't take it very long to get tender and put onions and butter and milk and sometimes tomatoes. P: That's nice. I have to write down some recipes, 'cause when we're done, I'd like to ask you quite a few, and also Aunt Lina. R: Yeah, she'll probably be able totell you. P: Have you seen the river change in your lifetime, the Suwannee River? R: I haven't seen the river change that much. I've seen Heart Springs change an awful lot. The boil is in an altogether different place to what it was when I grew up. P: Really? Where was it when you grew up? R: When I grew up it was a little north of where it is now. And there was a road, actually there was a road between where it is now and where it was when I grew up.

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SR9A/page 29 P: Gee. Why was Heart Springs called Heart Springs? Was it named after a family? R: I really don't know. I don't know if Lina would know or not, but I just don't know. P: Did you go swimming there much? R: Yes. Occasionally. We didn't go there a whole lots. We went down, I think it's interesting that we went bathing there when we had worked all day in the hot sun in late afternoon, we would literally go bathing because it wasn't commercialized like it is now. There, some people were there, if there were anyone they'd probably be just neighbors and we'd take a towel an soap and washcloth and literally go down to bathing. P: Uh huh. Well, you must have taken turns. R: Yeah. (laughter) P: Okay. Did you bathe a lot, or is it a thing that you always hear about once-a-week bathing? R: Saturday night bath? P: Uh huh. R: Well, I think when you worked out, you know, and got dirty and sweaty.... Of course, we didn't have bath tubs. We had, you know, a big washbasin. You wasn't with us the day we went down to Miss Jester's. She has some of the old cans like you used to get them, and you just sort of, as my aunt used to say, just sort of took a dry-cleaning, I guess, you know and then maybe on Saturday nights you'd get in the, get the washtub in and fill it up with warm water and really, I guess, I guess that's where the idea came from, Saturday night bath and the other nights you would just sort of... P: Rinse off. R: ... take a dry-cleaning. P: Okay. Did you make your own soap? R: My mother made the soap to wash clothes with. Now we didn't bathe with that. We bought it. P: What, you bought soap for bathing? R: Bought toilet soap for bathing. P: Did you swim? Did you actually know how to swim? R: I didn't swim very much. I swam very little. P: Did most women, probably fewer girls ever swam than men. R: I would thinkmost, most girls who grew up in that area who had brothers or younger fathers probably would, but dad wasn't up to, up to going in with us. He was sixty-two when I was

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SR9A/page 30 R: born so time I got up any size, well, he wasn't really up to going in with us, I think he swam when he was younger. But many times they'd have to swim across the river, swim the horses across and that sort of thing, different places, but I really didn't go swimming P: Okay. Well, I've heard Earl and Aunt Ruby says... R: P: ... right-I couldn't remember his last name for a minute -that there are not as many fish as there used to be in the Suwannee River. Is that your experience or do you think you can make a comparison? R: I don't know about that really. I think that he would be a better authority on that than I. I've heard people say that because the, the, well, I guess because most people fish there and another thing, because of the motor boats... P: Uh huh. R: ... that go up and down there, I guess. P: Wash away all the eggs. R: Uh huh, uh huh. Killed it. P: Let's see. How have you seen the are around the river change in your life? R: Well, I think it's changed a considerable. I don't think the people who live there live anything like we did, because it's modernized and they now have in rural areas anything that we can have in an urban area. They have their television sets, they have their deepfreezes, they have electricity, have running water and bathtubs and that sort of thing where when I grew up we didn't. We, we had a windmill. You've see them, you know, a windmill, maybe... P:: Uh huh. R: ... that pumped water, but we had to carry it to the house. It didn't run up to,the house, it didn't.... P: Well, what do you think was the most valuable experience of growing up that way? What did you learn from it? R: Well, I think it's like Dr. McCrae, my mother's doctor said, the morning she died, he said -well, she was ninety-two -and he said, well, he said the younger generation will never

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SR9A/page 31 R: live to be this old, probably. He said, they're not conditioned for it as they grow up and I think that as we grew up, we were conditioned for these things, I don't think, and it isn't their fault at all, it's just the circumstances and the times that my children could go through with what I had gone through with, even in rearing a family, because as they grew up they were not conditioned for it. I didn't want them to be. I didn't want, you know. P: To have the same kinds of things. R: Uh huh, uh huh. Same kinds.... P: But you think it gave you strength? R: Yes, uh huh. I think it does. I think it yeah. P: Where did boys meet girls and girls meet boys? R: School or church out by the times at church and.... P: Did they get married younger? R: I think so. I think much younger, course I was eighteen and Moe was twenty-three when we married, but I think it was a general thing that they did marry much younger. I know his parents married -I think his father was maybe a little older, but his mother was rather young, fifteen, sixteen. P: Really? That's something. Did you have any special places for courting? Karen told me about a saying, Meet me at the mouth? R: Well, that was my mother. We really didn't, we really didn't have that place. You know, Moe, now, he had a car when we dated and we went places, but I think that was right there where my mother grew up. I think that was quite the thing down the mouth of the.... P: Will you tell me about it? Is that the same as she told you? R: I know very little about it. My mother wouldn't talk about things like that much to us. I don't know why, but she was very reluctant to talk about some of those things. P: But meet me at the mouth basically meant.... R: At the, where the Santa Fe goes into the Suwannee River and of course, it was very pretty area down there and very picturesque and, I guess, very romantic, so it was a nice place to meet. P: It was a courting place.

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SR9A/page 32 R: Yes, uh huh. (laughter) P: Were there generally to go around or enough women to go around? R: I think it was very much then like it is now, seeing so many of them. I really do think.... P: So you had a pretty good choice. R: Yeah. P: Okay. I think I've already asked you.... Oh, did you use any wild plants for food, like for pies or fruits or honey or trees or grasses? R: No. I heard of people who used the polk.. P: Polk weeds. R: ... polk weeds, eat, ate that, but we never did. I've never eaten any, but I've heard a lot of people who did. P: Did you ever hear of any charms or spells, even if you don't believe in them, like how could you tell if someone loved you or how could you make someone love you? Things like that. R: No. I can't think of one right now. Probably I heard some, but can't think of one right this minute. P: I've already asked you about dreams. Did you have any heroes, or know of any heroes that were on the river, say a Paul Bunyan of the Suwannee River? R: No, no, not especially that I can remember. P: Did you ever hear of Lord Bill of the Suwannee River? R: I've heard the name, but that's all. My mother used to talk about that some, I've heard her talk about it some. P: Oh, really? Then maybe Lina might.... R: Yeah, she might remember something about that. P: Any strange people or talked-about people, people who were different, who were unusual, bad people? R: We had, we had some people who were share-cropping with us one year and they were very -I don't know what the word is -but anyway, they were very backward people and really not very clean and they were working around there and his wife had gone over into Dixie county and she came back and when she got to the river, the river was high, you know. That river comes up high sometimes, it's way out there where you have do go. And she waded across the river and game out there and when she got home, why, he was up at the house, I think we were

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SR9A/page 33 R: grinding cane and he was helping around the house and she was bare-footed -she went bare-footed most of the time -and I remember him looking at her and said, My God, Annie, why don't you put on your shoes. P: Oh, no. Did people go barefoot a lot then? R: Adults didn't, that I saw they didn't. Of course, children did in the spring and summer. Children went barefoot, but the adults did not. I don't, you'd see more of that now, I think. P: Did you ever hear any stories of the Klu Klux Klan? R: No, we didn't hear much about the Klu Klux Klan. P: You were telling me a story once about a doctor who was involved with a woman who killed him? R: Oh, yeah. Ruby McCullom. P: Ruby McCullom. R: He killed Dr. Adams in Live Oak. P: And that was a big scandal back then. R: Oh, yeah, yeah. That was something, yeah. P: Can you tell me about it? R: Well, reportedly, she was his mistress and had had one child by him and was pregnant with another child and, of course, there were a lot of tales about it that they were mixed up with Bolita and one thing and another, but one Sunday morning she just went in his office -I guess, evidently he had patients on Sunday morning -and she just had her little gun and shot him. Killed him instantly. P: And there was a trial. R: Yes. And this William Bradford Hewey came down from the north and tried to interview her and he was forbidden to include, the authorities, legal authorities didn't want him to interview her. They didn't want the story published. But it was published and the story was banned in Florida for a while. But I saw, the other day, in the Lake City Reporter, where this is going to be, come out in the Lake City Reporter in serial form. P: Wow. R: I'm looking forward to seeing it.

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SR9A/page 34 P: Yeah, that will be something. R: I read it way back then, but, of course, I've forgotten my little details, but I think one reason it was banned was because it named so many prominent people in Lake City and Live Oak who were involved in that, in it, so.... P: Uh huh. I can imagine that would have a great deal to do with it. R: Yes. P: Was Lake City called Lake City when you were growing up or was it called Alligator? R: It was called Lake City ever since I've known it. Of course, I was an adult. I was married before I moved to Lake City. When Moe and I married we lived in Bell for about two years. That was in the good old Depression years. P: With your parents? R: With his parents, yes. P: His parents. R: And he, they had a grocery store, and he managed the grocery store and Depression years came on and it just got worse and worse and this music company came through, a man that we met the other day, Cecils, it was actually his uncle that came to Bell, taught singing school there and Lloyd and Geneva and him went and he asked Moe to go with him and teach singing schools because Moe was a good singer then and he asked him to go with him and he taught singing schools then, I guess for about a year, or longer than that I guess, and evenutally he got, someone asked him to go to Manville which is a suburb of Tampa and he taught some schools around there and we moved down there and stayed down there for two or three years and eventually came to Lake City in 1937. P: Uh huh. So the Depression years were hard. R: They were hard. When you live on $2.50 a week. P: Uh huh. R: Of course, we had vegetables growing and had some chickens, which helped. But $2.50 would buy much more than it will now. $2.50, 10¢ would buy ten pounds of meal. You could buy a stalk of bananas, if you went to some of those fruit markets down there for a quarter. And, you know, $2.50 bought, well I say $2.50, we had more than that. We really didn't have much money to live on. P: Uh huh. And you were having children then.

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SR9A/page 35 R: Yes.Uh huh. P: Which makes it even harder. R: That's for sure and trying to get started, young people trying to get started. P: So your husband taught singing schools? R: Yes. P: And he was a minister? R: Yes. P: How did that happen, becoming a minister? R: Well, before we were married, he went Freed-Hardeman College, which is a Bible School? P: Where? R: In Henderson, Tennessee. P: Okay. R: Well, prior to that, as I had said before, he was a good singer, he just had a perfect ear, almost, for music and was a good singer, he had travelled withthis evangelist who did a lot of evangelistic work. P: What was his name? R: Cleve Moor. And Cleve did the preaching and Moe'd direct the singing. So eventually he became interested in doing ministerial work himself when he.... He always wanted to go back, and I wish he could have, but the war, the Depression came on, and the children came on, and somehow or another we never did get back. P: But he used to preach. R: Yes. P: In Lake City? R: In Lake City. He worked more with small congregations and rural congregations because he always felt like he, especially after we had a big family, it was too much to ask somebody to support a big family, and so, and then he worked with the black people in Lake City for quite a while and he worked for small congregations and did this. P: Karen said that he knew how to make baskets. R: Yes. Uh huh. P: Do you know how he did it? R: No, I don't. I really don't.

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SR9A/page 36 P: Fish traps? R: He, yeah, he made fishnets. He and Karen did some of that, but I never did learn the fine art of doing that. P: Okay, I'll ask.... R: He was very creative, just a very creative person. P: Sdunds like a nice man from what Karen told me too. She really loved him. R: Yeah, yeah. P: Did you ever hear any tales of the river such as pirates and gold and steam boats? R: I heard a story, up from White Springs, there's supposed to be.... Have you gone on that boat trip out from White Springs? P: I've been in a canoe there. I haven't gone on a boat trip, but I've been up in a canoe all up in that area. R: Well, we'd take the children, and, of course, this is just a tale they told the children. A certain place up there there's a ship or a something, and according to this -I can't remember if it was an Indian boy or an Indian girl; anyway, one or the other -it was a boy a white, a white and an Indian fell in love with each other and they wouldn't let them marry and so one of them jumped in the river and drowned and then the other one saw that they had jumbed in, they said, they saw him down there with their arms open. The rocks opened up and the other one jumped down and joined them. P: Oh, wow. R: That's off of White Springs. That's the tale they used to tell us when I'd go with, I was a room-mother a lot of times when my children was in school. Took the children on those trips. P: Speaking of Indians, didyou ever hear any stories of Indians from your mother or your father? R: No, I never remember any. P: Did you ever hear any of those other stories of the river? Bootlegging, pirates, gold, rum-runners? R: There's supposed to be gold there in the river that was buried there in the Civil War. In fact, people had gone and dug out from Bell. I believe it was right near Fowler's Bluff. Recently.

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SR9A/page 37 P: Was it from a steamboat or.... R: I think it was boat that they sunk. Evidently it was a steamboat, but I don't think they were able to find anything. They have found something down there but they have never been able to get it up out of the water, out of the river. P: Did you ever see your mother or father talking about the steamboats? R: Yes. My mother said that when she was young that she and some of her brothers and sisters went on one of their -I believe she called it an excursion from Branford to Cedar Keys on the Belle of the Suwannee and she said that was really, that was really something. P: Do you remember what she said about it? R: Oh, she was very pleased. She said they had an excellent time. I think they spent the night and came back. P: Now, the steamboats used to bring supplies up the river. R: Yes. P: Did they have a bell? R: Yes, I think they had a bell and a whistle that blew. I understand they had a whistle that blew. And there were several stops along Gilchrist county that I've heard my parents talk about. One was Fort Fanning, which was very prominent. P: Fanning Springs, was that Fanning Springs? R: Uh huh, at Fanning Springs. The fort was right, you know, the spring has a little run and the fort goes right there. I think this was a fort during the Seminole War? I'm not sure about that. P: Uh huh. That would make sense. R: Seemed like it was during the Seminole War that that was a fort. I think there's a, there's a Columbia county, history of Columbia county has something about that in it. And another place that the steamboat brought the supplies and people met them was at Yular Landing. That's Y-U-L-A-R is the way the spell it. Yular Landing. P: Okay. Can you tell me where it is, because that's a town or an area that no longer exists. R: Exists. That's true. It's a ghost town completely. Well, on the river, it's, it's about three or four miles north of Heart Springs. And the little town of Yular was about a mile, mile-and-a-half, I guess, east of there. And of course, lot of the people, pioneers who settled there during that time would have supplies come in. I remember seeing, when

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SR9A/page 38 R: I was a child growing up, of course, you saw wooden boxes, then. You very seldom see a nice wooden box, now, but I can remember seeing that my father would have a wooden box and it'd have Yular, Florida on it, you know. Evidently it came down by steamboat. And another one that was very prominent in that time was Wanee. And then they came in there and then, of course, Branford. 1 Is that, that's not a ghost-town, Wanee. R: It was at one time, but they have gone down there and are re-building it. I understand there's some nice homes down there. I don't know. I haven't been down there right lately. But at one time it was, you know, everything was practically gone. There was a big sawmill there at one time. P: Okay. That's what I was going to ask you. R': At one time it was practically a ghost town, I think, but I understand that they are subdividing it now, and I hear they're building some nice homes down there. P: You all ever go on a boat much in the river? R: No. P: So it wasn't a commonly used way to travel. R: No. P: How about crossing the river to go visit neighbors or.... R: No, but there used to be, at McCrab Ferry which is right down from Heart Springs. Do you know where that is, McCrab Ferry? P: I know where Heart Springs is. I don't know where McCrab Ferry is. R: Well, it's right there at Heart Springs, just, oh, maybe a half a mile. I'm not very good judging distances, but it's right there at Heart Springs. They used to have a plant there and I would, had gone with my father. The grist mill was on the other side of the river, and Mr. White operated the grist mill and they also operated the ferry and you go there, and could call them, and they would come across and get you and go on the other side and get your grits and meal ground and they'd bring you back from the other side with the wagon and buggy. I guess buggy, seems like we were in, on the slats. Then they had oars that they pulled it across with. It was a on a, was guided by a wire and it'd take you across. P: That is something. So the river wasn't really all that important in your every day life.

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SR9A/page 39 R: No, not really when I was growing up, it wasn't. I think maybe before my time when they first went there, when they really depended on it more for supplies, it probably was. But, you know, when I was growing up, Trenton and Bell were there and we went to those places. P: Now, you remember Old Peggy. Can you tell me about that? R: Oh, yes. When Peggy came to town that was the highlight of the day. Everybody in Bell had to go out and see Peggy. The children rode to Old Peggy, rode Peggy down to Wanee. They had a y down there you know. That's where they turn the train around to river, so they had to turn around there and come back. So they went through Bell and went down to Wanee and turned the train around and came back. So usually the school children, that was their field trip, one of their big days, was to get on Peggy and go to.... P: It was a steam engine. R: I forgot if it was, but I don't P: Do you remember when it came, across the R: Usually around the middle of the day. It was not very punctual, it (laughter) varied from two or there hours. It was really not very punctual. It brought the mail in and it also brought supplies for it, and had one passenger coach, I guess. P: And where did it come from? R: It came from Starke, let's see, I think it was Starke, High Springs, Williford -now that's another ghost town -we went and talked about Tarheel and Williford. P: Tarheel? R: (laughter) Yeah. P: Why was it called Tarheel? R: I think it was a sawmill at one time and maybe also it was on the railroad and it was where they loaded gum that they dipped, you know... P: Uh huh. R: ... when they turpentined the trees and they dipped that up and they put it in barrels and I think that's one of the places that they shipped it from. P: So they would call that tar? R: Yeah, uh huh. I guess that's where it got its name of Tarheel.

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SR9A/page 40 P: And where are those towns located? R: Those towns are located east of Bell, between Bell and High Springs, P: And which one's first? R: I believe Tarheel is first and then Williford. I'm not absolutely sure about that but I can P: Now, do you have other things that you were going to tell me about that you've been thinking of? I've asked pretty much much of the questions that I have written down. R: No. I don't think of anything that I know. You have it covered. P: Okay. If you think of anything when you are talking to Aunt Lina, you can just interject it in. R: Oh, okay. I'll try to think and maybe carry me a pad or something. If she makes me think of something I'll write it down rather than interupt her, because I general watch her line of thought as she's talking. P: It goes away? R: Uh huh. Yeah. P: Oh, okay. I'll remember that. Well, do you remember words to your song, "How Not to be a Rubberneck?" We'll try to get that on here. R: I know the chorus but I was trying to think how it started. The chorus is, "When there's something to be seen, don't act silly, don't act green, don't be a rubberneck." When they sang it it was a quartet, then when they would sing this, somebody, they'd have someone stationed in the back of the building, probably, to make some big commotion, you know, and everybody'd look around, and then they'd start singing, "Don't be a rubberneck." They're cute at that This man that we visited in Cross City the other day, that was one of the songs that they used to sing. Moe used to sing with them. P: Okay. Well, I could maybe get the song from him, too. R: I, I don't know if he would have it outright. I don't know. He might.